sahmeepee

I read in one of the computer mags that all secondary pupils in Lothian (somewhere in Scotchland I think) will be getting a PDA gratis if their local government get their way. That's 60,000 pupils and 6,000 teachers! (golden rule of educational IT policy: never give anything out unless teachers can get a pressie) Ouch ouch ouch. The only link I could find was this blog post which makes it seem a little less likely to happen than the magazine did: http://crunchgear.com/2007/01/23/scots-to-students-have-a-handheld/ Surely it'd be quicker to buy some shredders and start chucking money in EDIT: Just noticed that article links to the one I read in IT Week: http://www.itweek.co.uk/2173098 Unfortunately their website is about as fast an aging tortoise meandering through treacle.

I use another one called "nopey" (google it) which can do all sorts of stuff like altering winamp volume and windows volume. When used with sysinternals' psexec command you can make it control remote PCs.

Just to add to Steve's comments, the versions of SIMS prior to August *won't* run on SQL Server 2005 according to (newbie EduGeek!) Toby Belfield. This means you will need to wait until the August release comes out, upgrade your SQL server to 2005, upgrade SIMS to August 07. They've done us a favour in doing this for August so we can do it in the holidays, but if it does overrun and become very late August I doubt we'll be doing any SIMS updates for some time.

I can't speak for the other methods, but I use the builtin shutdown command to remotely shut down computer suites. It doesn't have any problem with computers being logged off at the time.

From what it says on the main Promethean site version 3 is designed to be installed side-by-side with version 2 rather than replace it. They say that's to allow the users to make the transition in their own time - presumably they were criticised about 1 and 2 being "too different" for teacher brains to handle. I know we had a bit of that. So: 1) No! 2) Alongside 3) Pretty sure they say yes to that too in the docs 4) No idea There are also newer (version 4.x) drivers if you've not seen that yet and it comes as an .msi

I might do that after the printers and users are migrated over to the PCL6 driver then possibly move them back to PCL5. I'm just puzzled about how it could happen to multiple PCL5 drivers within days. Possibly they have some files in common and one has become corrupted.

We have a strange problem where a few of our HP network printers have decided to start printing multipage documents on 1 page, but not by shrinking the text - they actually print the pages overlaid as if you'd put them through the printer multiple times. Changing over to the PCL6 driver works, so it's only a problem with the PCL5 driver. I'm wary of this though because we've found that the PCL6 drivers are more problematic than the PCL5 in the past so I'd like to find out why perfectly working PCL5 drivers have suddenly gone haywire. Has anyone else seen this problem? It's happened on multiple printers, not all of the same model. We have put out .net framework 3 recently, but that's the only major change to the clients I can think of in the last week. The server hasn't had any updates in the last week or so.

Yeah, sure. I'll send you a PM cos it might be fiddly to set up. EDIT: Sent! If other people might find this useful I'll post it in a new thread. I'll try to knock up some easy-to-follow instructions first though.

Part of our kixtart login script logs this info to a sql server which we query from some very handy web pages. It allows us to view the information in all sorts of ways - from simple user + computer searches to more complex aggregated views showing trends etc. Once it's in a database it's easy to work with the data. On the security front you could at least make sure the database account used by the login script only had the ability to add records. Our database has logged over 400,000 logins and it's still pretty tiny.

Yeah, or remove .lnk files from the list of executable file types. I'd go with Norphy's suggestion. The problem is that it needs to "run" the item in the start menu, then run the actual program. If your users are picking up some start menu items from the default user profile rather than all users (generally not good anyway, but that's another story) then you might need to loosen up restrictions on %userprofile%\Start Menu

We've had some problems in SIMS.net on computers that didn't have 1.1 and 2.0 installed. Best to go for the whole shebang probably. When I installed .net 3.0 on a computer with 1.1 and 2.0 already on, the c: drive ended up with about 185MB less space.

@Lee I think I read that somewhere too @cybernerd Admittedly it's getting into kludge territory, but.. add a new volume and format it backup (ntbackup/whatever) the contents of a big folder on c: onto that volume (or ideally elsewhere) rename the big folder on c: and create one with its original name, but (IMPORTANTLY) leave that empty open diskmgmt.msc right click your new volume > change drive letters and paths click add click "mount in the following empty ntfs folder" and browse for the empty folder you made on c: ok it all restore the backup into your new, empty folder Obviously take care when doing all that and choose which folder you move wisely. I'd probably do a dry run first with a dummy folder

I like PRTG on Windows. The free version only gives you 3 monitors at once, but I don't think the paid-for version is expensive. Very easy to set up.

The screens are the expencive part. £170 each. £170 per screen?!? At that price it's probably much cheaper to get standard 17" TFTs for £80-90 each and let them break them.

I wonder why the last guy left? Headhunted by his local newsagent for a paper round?

Thanks for the heads-up! Can anyone track down a guide to what's new in version 3?

We're probably going to go ahead with them anyway. I believe "Assessment for Learning" is the phrase du jour. I'm sure there are a million better ways to assess pupils' ICT skills, but the Head of ICT wants the test because it is about applying skills rather than just testing knowledge/theory. He also thinks he will find the results they send back useful. At this point I can't find much out about how they are changing the test itself. For example, are they still issuing 2 50 minute tests within a specified test window this year? And next year? I gather that they plan to keep using the software for about another 6 years pretty much unchanged (chortle!) Presumably they will be able to sell off a few CPS web servers at RM HQ - I think the server load might be dropping a fair bit! Incidentally, we had an HMI inspector in looking at ICT recently.. one of his points to focus on was the KS3 ICT test and what the kids thought of it etc. He wasn't aware when he arrived that it had been scrapped a week earlier. Needless to say, the kids slagged it off quite nicely. Maybe they aren't such a bad bunch after all

You could try Netpoint from Neutex: http://www.neutex.net/ It's free and gives you quite a few different views on the information. (It also does a pretty thorough hardware inventory and does need any agents installing on the workstations)

Great stuff Dan. Please make an announcement in here when the new version is released. Thanks

If you are after digital signage software I saw a couple on sf.net the other day. Search for "signage" and they should show up. I haven't had chance to try any out yet mind you.

Will driver signing fix that long-standing bug with the board being picked up incorrectly as a standard human interface device in XP? We've done the workaround in the past, but I've got another 9 boards going in this summer so it'd be good to know if it's fixed yet. @plexer: we run quite a few boards over usb, but drawing power from the serial bodge connector and we've not had any issues as yet.

I'm sure someone could make a cool version of battleships for that

Unfortunately, it may well suck. The original Clerks is one of my favourite films of all time, but sequels are so hard to get right. One cool thing they're doing is releasing the director's commentary for free download so you can go back to the cinema and watch it again with headphones on.

Were Planet switches included free with switch cabinets until 5 years ago?

I tend towards MPC too, although VLC does have its plus points.