Roberto

Completely agree. The country was living above its means so savings and cuts were needed but I think its gone too far and too hard. There's a difference between cutting your electricity bill by turning off appliances when you're not using them and cutting your electricity bill by switching it off at the mains and making do with candles everywhere.

The samsung lasers are quite good for a home printer. Got myself a 300N years ago and its really been good and reliable, got my brother to get a slightly newer model from them and its been equally good for him.

I'd say that's a worthwhile upgrade in its own right. This will get you some big improvements over the 4208 series. We use 5406/5412zl switches as edge switches here and I've been impressed with them. There's a company we use that are good at sorting this kinda thing out in a rush if you want to PM me for their details, though it sounds like you have that covered either way.

I can see a network that's just grown to meet its needs being configured like this. This can all be configured out of current hardware, with maybe a bit of fun and games and a few upgrades, but doing so without disrupting the continuing use of that stuff for curriculum won't be quite so easy.

Well this is where you return and tell them it's no problem to give them what they want but you require the following resources: {whatever you decide, enough to provide a separate 'guest' wireless VLAN at the very least, though if they want the event twittered and facebooked and you don't normally allow access to those on site then you'll need to provide alternative filtering policies, etc. and you'll need a 'guest' device to test all this with}. If they don't want to go for that then they can't have their magical "BYOD" guest wireless network. Simple as. When you posted about a 'teachmeet' I wasn't sure if that was this week's term for a baker day or whatever, but yeah if this is external people coming on site then you need to maintain a gap between the guest wireless network and your main network (we do this) and I'd say this was an absolute requirement both for safeguarding and the security and integrity of the business functions of the school.

What exactly do you have to implement. And don't say "BYOD" - that's just marketing mumbo-jumbo. What exactly do they expect you to provide? A wireless connection? - What about the one you have now. If this is just something your bosses want to show off at a meeting (what's a 'teachmeet'?) when can't you fake it via your normal wireless provision for that?

Well we're a college so we're dealing with young adults - who apparently still can't cope with a bit of snow. It's depressing. I was out driving last night and the snow was settling on the A14 and A1 and in places the drive home in the dark on that surface was a properly scary white-knuckle ride even thought it had been gritted, with people sliding about all over the place - some due to idiotic driving but some down to the weather and the roads. If it had been like that this morning I'd be in favour of places shutting. But there was no problems at all that I saw in my 20 mile drive to work today.

I'm a little hacked off with the local radio. They had someone on there talking about how terrible it was that schools shut when it snows, and they were reading out texts from people agreeing with them. I texted in to say that a) we were open, and that b) when we were open the last time the snow was bad, parents complained that we were open, as did one of the station's other presenters, and as such I thought they were being a little unfair by blaming it all on staff. Oddly enough they didn't read out my text. Gits. Having said that, we're open as normal today, the buses are running as normal, the roads are pretty much clear, and as such I don't understand why so many schools in the area are shut, at least those that are in towns rather than villages.

I'd have said the most logical thing to do would be to create this as a registry value and provide a Group Policy Object template that allows people to set it via Active Directory. This would make both initial deployment and any future requirement to 're-home' your software as servers are retired/upgraded quite easy for any moderately experienced IT person.

As much as I think its an unusable mess from a UI perspective, there's no doubt that it does well on older hardware. This is a bonus of its resource use being so aggressively trimmed down to better fit low-powered tablet use.

Or substitute mac for "high quality hardware from a Windows OEM with a good reputation", if you prefer. Horses for courses and all that, but I can't hear your tears over the sound of the macs I have at home doing what I want them to do with no fuss or bother or maintenance that reminds me of being at work while I'm trying to relax.

I understand perfectly well what you're trying to say. Please read my reply again with the assumption that I understand what you're trying to say and that I'm attempting to explain to you why your concerns aren't quite right, rather than with the assumption that I've misunderstood you...

... Ah fair enough. Lets back up a bit and discuss something fundamental about capacity on modern network devices. Think of bandwidth/throughput on switches (and capacity on servers for that matter) as a cake you're trying to cut into slices and share between your clients, so the more clients you have the more there are sharing the cake. Your posts suggest your current thinking sees it as more like filling a jug - e.g. if you have a 2gb uplink and 2 1Gb clients the link is full, which is not the case. To stretch these analogies further, buying a 10Gb capable switch as an upgrade to a 1Gb one, or combining several 1Gb conections, means you a larger 'cake' to share, which can work both in the sense of allowing more clients to have a share, and/or allowing those clients to have a bigger share. More importantly, the clients sharing the switch are not all broadcasting at full pelt all the time. The nature of both ethernet connections and TCP/IP tends to lead to 'bursts' of data transmission, which lends itself quite well to sharing. We've got edge switches that comfortably serve 300 devices, for example (HP 5412ZLs) with dual 10Gb uplinks and bandwidth has not been an issue on any of these.

It amuses me to see people standing up for one party or another as if that would actually make much of a difference. When you vote, you're not voting to determine whether you're going to be screwed by the next govt. or not, you're just picking the brand of lube.

Just human nature, everyone loves a moan. When was the last time someone dropped by your helpdesk to say "I just thought I'd mention how nice and fast and reliable the network was today..."

This is a post I can get behind. What's needed - by the politicians and those who like to comment on them - is a bit more direct action on the actual problems and a bit less sniping backwards and forwards with political soundbites. And a lot less arguing over what colour to paint the shed while the house is still on fire.

I ran it for a few months, up until the other week when I gave up on it and went back to Windows 7. There are some nice ideas in Windows 8 but there's a lot that's broken too, starting with that god awful start menu. It appears to be very divisive; everyone seems to be saying either "it sucks" or "it's great". I've seen very few "meh, whatever" posts about it.

We've printed about 16,000 sheets so far today...

I'd agree with that - the most important thing to know in IT is your own limits. Simply being aware that you don't know it all makes you much more valuable to those around you than the people who never learn and blunder into bad situations time and time again @Little-Miss. I've been doing this for about 20 years and I am still learning and still make my share of cock-ups. @Norphy could regale you with a few tales of stupid things I've done, $deity knows.

This pretty much describes my feelings, except that I found myself not using TIFKAM at all in the past few months, and I found myself getting more and more annoyed with those tiny little things that just felt wrong with Windows 8 to the point where I gave up and rolled my home machine back to windows 7. And frankly, it's real good to be 'home'.

Then they can piss off as far as I'm concerned. There's plenty more fish in the sea. Windows 8 is crap, and I'm certainly not going to recommend we upgrade to it.

They're not always like that, you must just be "lucky". As I've said before, I do like the macs I use personally, but I'm far from convinced that they're good bet for the enterprise right now... and yeah anyone who thinks they never go wrong is a twit who shouldn't be allowed unsupervised access to an abacus, let alone a computer.

At the risk of doing a good captain obvious impression, this comment is key. It's impossible to formulate a 5 year goal/strategic plan for any support department without understanding the 5 year goal and/or strategic plans of the organisation - the organisation should have an overall strategic direction which your strategic planning has to enable and support. For example, if the goal of the organisation is to become a centre of excellence for media/film courses then you need to ensure your plans don't involve moving everyone to a VDI infrastructure that won't support video editing software...

We've gone 64 bit everywhere except a few tablet/netbook machines that only have 32 bit touchscreen drivers. We've had no problems - we simply told teaching departments "The following software will not work (....) so you need to find replacements for them, which we will be happy to assist you with"

Irony points AND verification of CESIL's issue. How could I say no?