indiegirl

Hmm. That might explain why my future employers are currently rushing their upgrades to Server 2k3 and XP desktops.... ;-)

Ahh, "but everyone loves Magical Trevor" ;-) I love Weebls Stuff - I have the Badger theme on my K700i, and when I left the Bank, one of my leaving presents was a Badger t-shirt with 'mushroom, mushroom' on the back (I still have that somewhere :-D) Scampi remains one of my faves, as is Magical Trev 1 and 2, 3 was never quite as good...

Sysman - have you got a Gmail account anyway? If you go to https://www.google.com/hosted/ you can sign in and register your interest for the Domain. If you need a Gmail account PM me your email addy and I'll invite you.

What a useful development. Do we know yet how much Google will charge for this service - not that we need it here but it could be very useful to the smaller schools in the area...

Now can we boast (like a certain other .com) that we "have over 1000 members and counting..."????

I'm going for Wednesday... between 12 and 2pm sometime... first instinct was 12.42pm

Where'd you get that information from? I've been trying to find that officially on the web (I did know it, I don't know how I knew it though) so that I can quote it to SMT and prove my point!

mrtech, did you mean IrfanView? Picasa is more than suitable, doesn't the newest M$ Picture Viewer (bundled with Office 2k3) go off and search your drives for pics as well?

Re-do entire Art/Music suite and redeploy old machines to Admin staff. Rebuild two ICT suites (for me only) Organise handover documentation for new staff member A general tidyup of rooms, paperwork, network, etc Reinstallation of Bromcom 'Winfolder' (new version) across all staff PCs (easy, thank god) New student / staff creation (on network, Sims, Bromcom, Truancy Call etc etc) Probably other stuff that a) I have forgotten and b) I don't really care about... Well, that's all I have planned. I daresay the NM has much less...... ;-)

I bought all my cable tidies on eBay - figured that I could spare the school a fiver! What about properly mounting the PCs under the workbench but off of the floor - we have just purchased these and I think we got them for about £50 each including locking bar. We had ours custom-built for the machines we're about to put in our Art/Music dept. Ours will be mounted under the benching towards the back, with space for cables etc at the back and the locking bar at the front - so access to the USB ports will be allowed, but the students won't be able to get to the back of the machine nor pull the towers out.

Now I know all about the freebie ones (Motherboard Monitor, HDD Temperature), but does anyone know if there's anything out there that's free which will monitor server temps - specifically hard drives and server ambient temps? The two I mention don't recognise our HP SCSIs. Reason I ask is that I'm thinking of putting a case together about HDD lifespans, money (potentially) wasted with the servers running too hot etc etc for the Governing Body to ask for efficient and correctly-sized air con for our server room (ex office).

I'm not even going to my server room... I daren't... Sweaty keys, sweaty mouse, sweaty room, sweaty boss, slightly-perspiring Indiegirl (actually, scrap that. Women don't 'perspire', we sweat as much as you gents in this insane weather).

Oh.. at *least* "£50" with WEEE directives...

I would start with the most simple things - forget the shared calendars and the fancy bits. I'd go with the cold hard approach: "if you don't invest in the ICT in this school, the whiteboards will be rendered useless as you will have nothing to run them". Start at the bottom - get the teachers interested in ICT again - get them using machines for presentations and classroom demonstrations. I'd tell them that their server's on its last legs (even if it isn't) and won't manage another school year in the state its in. If you have another school that's a year or so down the line from this one (with what you want to achieve already working in the 2nd school), arrange to take them around and give them a demo of the stuff working. At the end of the day they'll only care about the cold hard cash, but the trick is to convince them that it'll pay for itself in the long run. If you can ask for money to invest in new printers, perhaps with management software, for example - you then have a good foot in with the "this will pay for itself in terms of money saved against the current printing mechanism within X years" (you'll have to work out the cost per page of the current stuff and paper wasted against the costs of new printers, their cost per page etc). It might be worth going down that route.. What about hardware issues... things are going to be dying on 6yr old PCs and servers.. it's going to get costly repairing them, not even taking into consideration your time doing it, and the time wasted with people off of the network whilst it's done. Then, as a last taster - chuck the shared calendars and development opportunities in - get them interested in investing first, and then tell them where things can go... what about

Congrats. We came out in December last year. Staff were over the moon. Can see us slipping back in though if we're not careful... standards haven't been maintained.......

A pitiful 6 here... DC, File, SQL, Mail, ISA, Backup. Obviously, some servers do several jobs! Plus a load of redundant old CSE servers just sat there, switched off. NM 'plans' to reintegrate them as a streaming media server amongst other things. It'll never be done :-D 300odd machines, 1000 students, 250 staff, 20 laptops, a few numpties, a hamster in a corner on its wheel and no air conditioning.

Absolutely - I'm thinking about buying in my last month to get the edu discounts... I'm *not* bothered about dual booting into Windows. In fact, I'm looking at the iBook instead of the Macbook to avoid the Intel processor... However, I can't help but be lured by the pretty Mac (there's a female hormone or two in me after all). Not only that, I believe that being used to Mac life would be useful for me professionally as well as personally - the broader a set of OSs I can claim to use, the better in my book. TBH, £650 is my max budget for my laptop. I'd take an Apple with a year's warranty for that, or a PC with 3yrs warranty... I just wondered what the obvious benefits of a Mac were...

Thanks, those are the sort of words I was looking for! The Mac is just a consideration at the moment, especially when I know I can get a Centrino NEC laptop with 3yrs extended warranty for under £600, and the refurbed iBook comes in at £635. The portability of software and ease of use is quite important to me..

I'm considering sampling 'the dark side' and getting myself a refurbed iBook from the Apple store. Thing is, I haven't used Macs a great deal before, so don't really know where to start. Is there open-source software available for Macs (like Open Office)? Or does an Apple ship with a M$ Office equivalent? I'm fairly intuitive when it comes to operating systems so I don't anticipate any problems there, it's just running software, and sourcing it, that's the bigger concern for me - and is the main reason why I haven't bought an Apple before... (as well as cost!)

I started with Streamline but didn't like their interface. Currently hosting the Giraffe site on http://www.servage.net - seem quite professional apart from the hiccup the other day with their fiber (4hrs outage). Other than that no problems - unlimited SQL dbs, 1110GB transfer every month, 75Gb space... £5.75/month (£69/yr) I sublet my area to friends to reduce the cost.

... with a phone in one hand, mouse in the other, typing with their nose ... as actual reps, not acting ones (see earlier thread :-D) ... for chocolate, sweets and beer ... because you are incompetent ... first thing in the morning

Why is it that I have a 865kb Adobe file, yet when I send it to print, it's suddenly 75mb? Is this to do with the compression that Adobe uses? Does it treat any non-text as a picture? Just a random Q....

Thank god he doesn't read this site... don't go giving him ideas.....

We're very boring here... servers are named as to what they do (not my idea, I was going to go for the Famous Five and Timmy the Dog as we have 6 servers in all) However the units collectively in their nice HP cabinet are known as Bertha (which always makes me hum the theme tune)

I bet they spin you a line like I got from my hosting company who had a 4hr outage in the week: "the primary fiber was cut by accident, and for some reason the secondary fiber didn't kick in as it was too close to the primary fiber" Yeah, I believed that too... not.