happymeal

Daft question since the thread is so old, but do you still have one knocking about?

Grrrr! Cheers for that!

Morning/Afternoon all! I've just been to check up on an OMR machine that a user has called to say isn't working. Now I got there and the machine is sat there, powered up, but with nothing on the display screen. The user said that she uses it to read Abscence Reports into SIMS, but when they try to use it SIMS isn't able to handshake the device. So I turned the power off, checked the cable/card on the machine, and checked the cable/card on the PC to make sure they were fine and not damaged. I then checked the COM3 settings on the PC against the settings for the device in SIMS and both of them match up. The OMR is a CD360, and the settings are are: COM3 BPS: 19200 Data Bits: 8 Parity: None Stop Bits: 1 Flow Control: None OMR Setup: Port: COM3 BPS: 19200 Data Bits: 8 Parity: None Stop Bits: 1 Now I've turned the OMR back on and there is power to it, but the display is lit up, but nothing else is appearing on the display (Apparantly there should be text on the display?). I've tried connecting to the device a few times through SIMS, but its failing on the handshake each time. I've tried altering the Bits per Second to see if that helps, but that doesn't seem to help either (Saw that suggested on here somewhere). I'm kind of stumped on this (Never-seen-one-before-kind of stumped!), and am not too sure what else to try! Anyone have any dealing with OMR's? *Meditates on the subject*

Just noticed this thread! I'm Daz, working in a school in Rawtenstall. I come mainly from a Finance background, and have always had a geeky interest in IT, furthered by the TA. I've only worked in IT for 2-3 years with the NHS, and am currently looking at where to start qualifications wise.

Have you thought about trying to get into teaching IT? Not in the 12-16 school enviroment, but more like teaching apprentices? Zenos and Baltic Recruitment have a lot of offices where they take in apprentices from 16-21ish and put them through 6-9 month training which covers Helpdesk, Field Tech work, Servers, etc, and pushes them towards the A+, N+, CCNA, etc. Was considering doing that for a while before I got this job - if you've got the skills it's worth a look?

UFO/X-Com games - this basically killed my studies at school!

As I was walking around the school earlier, a bunch of kids started throwing chocolate eggs at me. I'll be honest, I was Kinder Suprise'd...

I just spent a day playing it my way instead of sticking to the Story time-line - way more fun playing with the Slicycle! ... You know what Kids? I'm closing the Tech Room up for a few hours...

Wait till you start playing it online...!

Dead Rising 2 - there's something about putting a Raindeer mount on a players head and charging through a horde of Zombies that just does it for me...

Hmmm I've nearly finished it and can't help but wonder if someone,, somewhere, for some reason, decided to build the game like this, in homage to the older ones, ie, blocky graphics, long load times (Pain. In. The. A$$!), etc? Don't get me wrong, I like playing it - but compared to Bulletstorm... Maybe they'll think about how badly it did this time, and actually build a better DN game?

Lost Vikings? Distant memories of shunning the great sunny outdoors to play that game are flooding back... Steam, just take this cheque and write whatever amount you want. It's gonna happen.

I'm not tossing the whole lot away - the idea of blocking Social Networks here was to stop Students sitting around in lessons playing on Facebook when they should be working (Yeah, the same applies to staff!), and is still in effect. But with this course (The select few that are doing it) will need to have access to Facebook/Twitter to see how a marketing campaign would run. This is because there's a lot of companies that would use both of those for marketing campaigns, updates, etc to reach out to the general public, companies, etc. So in this case, only those few would have access to it during those lessons.

..... I love you! I shall get on with this now and let you know how it goes!

Afternoon one and all! I've got ticket logged where a Teacher has asked for me to unblock Facebook/Twitter for a class that are doing an e-marketing course. She said that she will either provide us with a set of names that will need access to this, or she will provide me with a list of Workstations that they will be using. I've checked our filtering for LancsNGFL, and it is allowed, but we've blocked it so that everyone doesn't spend all day monging about on there. Now if I add it to the approved list, everyone will have access to it - which is what we don't want to happen. I was thinking of trying to find a way of somehow creating a group that would only have access to it, or somehow locking down those Workstations so that only those ones have access to it (Think that would be harder, plus the potential is there for other students not on the course to abuse it). Any thoughts? Has anyone here had a similiar problem/request like this? *Begins meditating on the problem*

Had a similiar problem printing out from Word 2010 and sometimes Notepad (When I was testing things) to a HP 4100, and found a fix that seems to work... I found that turning the Advanced Printer Features off on the printer seemed to get it printing properly (Can be found under Printer Properties/Advanced/Advanced Printing Features). Had that off for over 3 weeks now and am still monitoring this printer, but all seems to be well with it now (Touching everything wooden and staking out a goat for sacrifice can't hurt either...).

Guess I'll retract my previous statement about tapping it on the head and install it for her! Cheers for the guidance!

Afternoon all! I thought I'd ask the nice kind people here (Yeah, I'm after something...) where they stand on VLC and schools. I've got a ticket logged with me where a teacher would like VLC deploying to a set of PC's to play DVD's. The PC's already have PowerDVD, and I'm tempted to knock this on the head before it becomes a case of "I want this because I like it" and just stick to one piece of software - however, I'm curious where people stand on having VLC within schools. I've personally no problem with using the software at home (Free and easy!), but I've heard snippets about legal issues about using VLC and DVD decoders (Can't remember what exactly, and I can't find anything about it) and just wondered what the implications would be if I did decide to roll this out in the future in a school enviroment?

Cheers for that - I've given that a try and it worked on 2 of them. But it turns out the other 3 are not working because of some dodgy software stuck on the PC's (Turns out someone without admin permissions as tried and somehow suceeded to install a dodgy copy of Photoshop...). Flatten the final 3, popped the image back onto the PC and re-installed Office 2010 with no dramas - cheers anyway!

Afternoon all! I've recently rolled out Office 2010 across the school, but seem to have a problem with just 5 PC's that refuse to take Office 2010... Originally, I used a script that removed Office 2003 and installed Office 2010, which seems to have worked with all of the PC's in the school, bar 5. When I attended to check these 5 PC's, Office 2003 was removed, but either 2010 was not installed, or it was installed but came up with the following error message when I tried to open Word/Excel: "This action is only valid for the products that are currently installed" I've checked the Event Log and it shows Office has finished installing, so I've cancelled the script, and tried to uninstall it and reinstall it from the Network. As I ran Setup, it would begin installing right up to the last minute, and it would just come up with a message that just said "Has encountered an error and could not complete". I'v tried re-installing it a few times, but I've still had no joy. But oddly, when I go to program files/microsoft office/office14 - I can run Word/Excel etc from there, with no errors or problems... I've tried linking the Program File shortcuts to this folder (Just for giggles) but no joy either. I've pretty much come against a brick wall here - has anyone come up against this type of problem before? Anyone managed to solve it?

Bright pink morph-suits are the way forward. True story.