sahmeepee

If it has a predominantly white splash screen and starts up in under 2 days it's the new database (MS SQL); if not it's the old one

I got some from ValuePowerSystems - http://www.vps-ups.co.uk

As you say, get a full list of requirements.... then find something on Sourceforge that'll do it for nowt.

Exactly my point! It's even more money than it looks at face value because you're not getting anything like the value for money that the 15,000-pupil headline number suggests.

LGfL is London Grid for Learning I think, so I'd assume the latter.

I think you might not have been sneaky enough with your calculations there. The exact quote is: That suggests to me that 15,000 pupils will use the facilities in that 5 year period, so if we said it was only for schools without 6th forms (for easy numbers), you would have 9 years' worth of pupils using the service in a school which taught 5 year groups at a time. That means you can divide the numbers again because the total number of pupils being taught in the school year 2010-2011 is (15000*5)/9 = 8,333 pupils. If all schools had 6th forms it would be 15000*7/11 = 9,545 pupils. I guess the real figure is somewhere in between, giving you something in the region of £360/pupil/year. Can I have a P please Carol.

Thin client solutions are definitely the way to go if you have a lot of pupils that would qualify for the money. If you only have a handful of "deprived" youngsters I'm not sure what the best way forward is - I can't see us setting up a terminal server (even virtualized) for the 1.5% of our pupils who are on free school meals. Although it sounds like a nice situation to be in, you have to bear in mind that those 1.5% are just a badly off as the 25% in the school down the road. Possibly the money won't be purely per-capita and we'll be able to sort something more expensive out.

My laptop drive started issuing dire warnings about SMART errors so I plugged in a large external USB drive, booted from Ultimate Boot CD, used a free imaging tool to image onto the external drive, then swapped the troubled HDD out for a new one and imaged the data back. I would try using a bootable CD rather than trying to boot from the HDD to reduce the potential for extra damage. Most of the widely available ones have a range of cloning and repair tools on them.

I had a great experience with my MCSA training - it was a mixture of straight reading material (online, but printable, from oreilly and others), screen captured demos with some powerpoint, live virtual machine sessions (you can get these for free on MS's site if you look around), timed tests and possibly one other element which I forget now. The whole thing was tied together with a nice flash-based timeline showing you where you needed to be day-by-day and what you'd achieved. I guess it was a kind of specialised VLE really. Obviously Moodle is going to be the preferred choice of VLE here, but I think it's important not to miss out tests at the end of each module as they really do help. One other thing which might be helpful for some is podcasts - perhaps just podcast versions of the reading material.

Our domain is part of an LA forest and as such we are only in charge of our own Exchange server, rather than the entire Exchange Organization. We found that we had the same problem you describe when some bright spark decided to change the recipient policy affecting our school. If you're in a similar set up or there's a chance someone has changed your recipient policies, take a look in Exchange System Manager at: YOUREXCHORG > Recipients > Recipient Policies You can use the last modified column to see if anything's been changed recently.

I agree with a lot of what localzuk and dhicks have said on this topic and it's something I've been spending quite a lot of time looking at in the last few months. For our school, the problems are exacerbated by having a relatively high proportion of "experienced" staff, which is great for teaching in general, but in many cases means their IT expertise is below average. That is a sweeping generalisation of course, but there's a correlation. Lack of dedicated training time is a real problem - on the spot help is OK and well-received but pretty inefficient for all involved. I'm planning to knock up a self-service intranet training site in the next few weeks which will allow any member of staff to offer a training session at a particular slot in the weekly timetable (Thursday lunchtime, say) and when X people have registered an interest, the "trainer" can contact the participants with a firm date. Hopefully it will help us capitalise on the expertise we already have in-house whilst fitting in around everyone's packed schedule. I'm not expecting any miracles from it though!

Aha! That is genius - I never would have spotted it! That is good news. It seems that on my PC when I open the QLT doc, it pulls in the QLT rtf file, but changes the page size to Letter instead of A4. Is this the case for everyone? I haven't tested it extensively on our site. It shouldn't be a problem here - I'll just change our login script to grab a tweaked version of the QLT doc file from the SIMS setups folder.

You could have a look at the new BBC Blast. It has a youtube-esque element to it and I believe the aspiring dancers/singers/whatnot can upload videos of their performances to be rated (subject to moderation by Auntie Beeb)

It might be worth running Wireshark on your DHCP server to see what it's doing. Make a note of the MAC address of a client PC (from the top of "route print") then boot it while wireshark is running and filter the results. That subnet of yours also looks a bit strange. Does it go from 16.1 to 18.255 or 16.1 to 17.255 or is it 3 class Cs? I'm not sure there's a valid subnet mask that will give you 16.1 to 18.255: a /22 network (255.255.252.0 subnet mask) gives you 4 class C's worth (ish) a /23 network (255.255.254.0 subnet mask) gives you 2 class C's worth (ish) a /24 network (255.255.255.0 subnet mask) gives you 1 class C worth

Presumably that's to handle the situation where people already had rtf files set up which they were happy with. Part of our login script checks to see if there's a newer rtf in our sims setups directory than the one on the local machine. If there is it grabs a copy. It's a shame you can't make SIMS.net do that itself during its startup checks.

At £30 per electrical socket, we'd pay for those people from Kirklees to come here. I'd hope they come with the NICEIC certs, but I honestly can't see how they could do it for that price even if they were doing a ton of them at once. Whilst £400 for a data point is expensive, I find that much easier to believe because it could be in a truly horrendous location and with more scope for additional costs.

Yeah, so blocking control panel should block this particular route (not verified that though) but obviously if they can run "mmc" and then add snapins they'll get to the same place. This is the recurring problem with group policies: they mostly stop people using a particular route to get to a setting rather than removing the right to change the setting itself.

We're in an almost identical situation with cabling - 2 buildings with a catenary carrying fibre between them and a requirement for a single digital signage setup managed from reception. I was looking at using the Samsung PX400N/PXN400 (i forget the exact part number) screens. They have a built-in XP embedded pc which can run web/flash/java/divx/blah and you can push data out to them rather than stream it continually and it will store on flash memory. The whole thing can be scheduled from an idiot-friendly interface (MagicNet i think it's called) on a standard PC. Insight were selling them at the time if you want to get a rough idea of pricing.

There's a fairly hefty kb article on supportnet about these sorts of problems. You may be able to fix it by specifying the IP of the server in the connection string. I will try to dig up more details if you don't have a Supportnet acc set up EDIT: Hopefully there's no problem with me posting stuff from Supportnet on here. If there is I'm sure Phil will let me know and I'll edit it back out! Here are the suggested fixes for your error:

Out of interest, does restricting access to control panel via GPO block this as "control" just launches control panel. Either way I'd hope that s/w restriction would sort it out for you.

I must admit, I lol'd at that comment! After having been presented with a truly heinous Listos Electronico (Heinemann) package to install (which requires all sorts of guff running on the server at all times and anything upto 3 server reboots during install) I'm surprised the number of NMs you spoke to was only in 4 figures!! The project you linked to does look interesting and I think (/hope) that a more general move towards SCORM as the standard for educational software distribution will solve a lot of headaches. No more will I be asked to register 3 ocx files, 2 dlls and rename an ini file on each workstation for a software title to work! Good luck to you!

When you create your maintenance plan in SQL2005, it should have 2 parts showing in the diagram window looking something like the attachment. If it doesn't, you can add one from the "Maintenance Plan Tasks" palette which should be on the left hand side of the SQL Management Studio window. Be aware that SIMS.net does its own db backups prior to every upgrade and these may well be clobbered after your cleanup cutoff (2 weeks in my example) so you might want to move them to a safe place.

The exact route depends on your version of sql server, but generally speaking you need to open the SQL Server management application and set up a maintenance plan. Assuming you've migrated to SQL2005 by now, it lives at: server\instance > management > maintenance plans - right-click - New maintenance plan By default that will back up to the Backups folder as m25man said, so you just need to back up the .bak file(s) in there to tape afterwards.

That would be an interesting interpretation of the "Future" element of BSF. Weren't prefabs the buildings of the future a few decades ago?! Come to think of it, can't we just Easyjet our kids to these cheap countries for their education for less than BSF costs

Is that not just because of the percent signs? Try the same script, but with double percents: cd /d %windir%\system32\wbem for %%i in (*.dll) do RegSvr32 -s %%i for %%i in (*.exe) do %%i /RegServer Further info: http://www.robvanderwoude.com/escapechars.html