Sirbendy

*chuckle*...same here. Well, she WAS, before going to webdev full time instead.

we're experts at plug 'n' play, after all..

phones can't be examined? We do here..SLT often bring phones in and ask us to interrogate/copy data from/wipe them.

Congrats matey.. We're expecting in November, and I'm writing a "sprog diary" already..including vids and pics of things that sprog might not get to see (elderly relatives, etc etc). Plan on keeping this up for the first however many years, as I figure it'll be nice for all to look back at.

freezer it. Bag, freezer, 30 minutes, plug in and try it. Did one that would run if kept icy cold...that was fun. Not. Combination of spray freeze on the PCB, and IDE-USB adapter with a long extender, leaving the drive in a chest freezer for the duration. After which we played football with it.

oh boy, am I dreading all the fun to come in November..

ooh, yes. Standby = naughty. Everything in each room on multiways, one point of "off", "off" happens when finished. All lights are 9/12watt CFLs (3 wall mounted uplighters in living room), again off when not used. Nothing major really..just a combo of using my energy meter and common sense. I wired each room up to multiways (e.g: living room had lights/simulated load, TV, Digibox, Wii, DVD player, and kettle linked up) then plugged into the meter at source and used as normal for an hour (including boiling a kettle once), took readings, then broke it down to each device, and planned accordingly. Can't say I feel I'm missing out...I have lights, TV, freeview, Dualcore PC, missus has her duallie laptop, we both have a netbook too..we just use £5 a week power. Nice. It was all kicked off by my last 1 bed flat, when the bill came to £350 and I told NPower they were having a laugh, and they could come and kiss my meter for the money. I bought the meter, did the simulations, calculated the costs for each appliance, applied it retrospectively and went back with the figures...they came out and replaced my meter. Never doing that again. I now take the meter to shops if I'm going to buy electricals and insist on seeing whatever I'm looking ats "real world" usage. Take my washer..it's a new Indesit WIB111. Nice. However, even "off" on the front it uses 8 watts, about the same as a CFL. Off at the mains for him. Same with my microwave in "non use" ...hence I cancelled it and went with a "non digital" unit that uses precisely nothing unless I'm literally cooking with it. Even my router is on a £1 timer switch so it's off when we don't need it/aren't there...

Ours went at midday. Total ballache. The leavers assembly was still being assembled at 11.03, to start at 11..thank god we always anticipate staff not listening to the 6 Ps. Got it all running, then got so tied up in that, it caused issues with a heads presentation to other heads, that's just finished. Gah. We've had tears, we've had hugs, we've signed books and shirts, and thank CHRIST it's done.

our big red switches are just that..heavy duty cooker-esque ones with neons, next to the teacher PCs... The heating in this place does cost a bomb..but we share the site with a leisure centre and ski-slope, so we apportion the bills accordingly. New place has ground-source heating loops and underfloor heating throughout, which should be minimal cost to run, as well as keeping the place to a fairly uniform temperature. REALLY looking forward to that. I'm hoping that the BMS will allow me to take data from it and graph it, so we can have a live display of wind turbine output, power usage, building temperature, ground source heat levels, mains/rainwater usage etc, and bolt it up with the display from our weather station, then put it to the display systems in the foyer and our IT office. I think it'd make interesting reading and possibly some interest for..say..science.

we have a nice setup here...kitchens and externals in one hall, all manner of options. I usually make my own, but on the occasions I've needed to go up it's been excellent.

same with our Cisco 7912s. My PC runs off mine.

loads of them about now... Some like that, some like multiways. Google "intellipanel", or "intelliplug" or similar. Bought one for my mum..PC goes into hibernate after 10 minutes, and off goes her laser printer, CRT, uplighter, DAB radio and heater. She loves it.

red light means it's powered but not communicating with the PC. It should go green when you install the software/drivers and reboot. And no, not run across the freezing with 10..we use it on all of ours..from the serial 580s to the USB 660s..no issue. Not tried with Vista/Windows 7 yet..just XP.

I've had some Elonex Webriders do that before...one made me temporarily deaf in one ear. Useless junk it was.

2.1, heh. CPU (Sempron64, 1.6) : 3.1 RAM (512mb): 2.9 Graphics (FX5200) : 2.1 Gaming: 3.0 Hard disk (WD 80gb IDE): 5.2 I'm only running it for a laugh. Works nicely though.

Acer Aspire One 150 (ZG5) Spares - Screen and bezel. on eBay, also Standard AC Power Supplies, Power Supplies, Laptop Accessories, Computing (end time 05-May-09 21:00:44 BST) £60?

with renault, hope it's warranty..heh.

I admit, a classic appeals to me now more than ever. Gone right off new cars, they all look the same and are about as much "driver involvement" as a fridge. I don't call electronics, drive by wire, ABS, EPS, ESP, TOSS etc as "real" driving. Safer maybe, but if I wanted to drive a PC wrapped in bubble wrap, I would. Give me the old world..carb engines, chokes, throttle cables, good old oily, simple fun. I liked my old Astra, and my Maestro before it. Both has PAS (although the ones before those didn't, and was I bothered?), and an auto box, and electronic ignition, and that was it. If you drove like a spanner, it bit you, not babysat. If you wanted to skid in the snow and have some fun, you could. I'd LOVE a mini estate. Old one mind. Computers in cars has reached a silly level. The Golf I had as a courtesy..lovely machine. DSG, ePas, traction control, stability program, all the bells and doodas. Yet it felt isolated. I felt like I was driving a ruddy simulator. No feedback at all.

What will it do in the long run though? It's all screwed. Look at it this way, we've been churning out thousands of vehicles a month that have no buyers, that then sit in storage fields and the like waiting to go to dealers. What good will scrappage do, when these vehicles are sitting waiting? We've built a house of bloody cards. Build things in excess, use things in excess, waste in excess, live in excess above our means, lend in excess...it was only a matter of time until it all fell down. Poor management, poor leadership, poor regulation. The car industry is shot to hell, simple as. Massive overstock to shift, still producing more, finding that the market is disappearing. One outcome. Sorry..I'm having an uncharacteristic negative day.. As to paying dealers to fix problems..bugger THAT. I've just bought a Vauxhall Dealer Workshop reference/repair DVD off eBay, an Opel laptop diagnostic and programming interface from Ebay, and a blanking plate for my iffy EGR valve. All in all it's cost me..about £50. Just to plug in at a dealer would be £60-65, not including any fixing. The economics of bangernomics is more my alley.

Hmm? The Big Red Switch system? Oh yes, every socket is switched as normal, but they all run as it were from the big red discipline switch.

same here - I used my power meter to check, but a Dell 17" value TFT used about 12 watts when running, and if you "power off" on the button, it STILL used 11 watts..just killed the output. Horrendous design. We also have powerout, but the LEA policies etc seem to interfere with it. Maybe in the new building. Movement sensors..we had. Electricians removed them as "useless"! 2 are now at my parents house, doing duty in the garage lighting system.. Excellent kit. No overrides either - you give teachers an override, they'll use it all the time. Not worth it. Think "idiot" and design accordingly. We've removed the aircon control and put them above the ceiling to stop staff buggering about with it. Lightswitches should be the same. Stuff the poxy keyswitches too...the kids just smash the facias off. Corridors should have the push "vacuum" delay switches or movement sensors IMO..no permanent on option. Loos the same. Can you tell it annoys me? I walk round turning lights off..sigh. Printers and the ilk I think should have a timeswitch built in, like the plugin ones I have at home. Set the "on" hours, walk away. Same with ring mains in the school rooms...if only they could run individually off timers for each room. That'd work nicely.

Our new tech is settling in nicely here - he shadowed us for the first 2 weeks to get used to the kids/staff, now he's fairly independent. As far as problems and resolving goes, he's not bad at the theory. Practicality wise, I will watch as he does things, and offer hints/help if needed. He spent 10 minutes renaming a load of our online curriculum files from .html to .htm, then I showed him how to do it in a few seconds with command line. I've also lent him some of my books on command line etc, and am putting some VMs of older Windows together to show him where "we're" from as it were (he's 17). Such things as discrete soundcards etc tend to throw him..he's of the generation where it's all been XP/built in/self configuring..but I expected that. I've had a few informal chats with him out of the office, as well as the usual "in office" banter - one of which revealed that for 3 weeks he'd had a bad back due to a naff chair, but he hadn't "wanted to whinge on" so had said nothing. I had to ding him round the ear for that and explain that quite frankly, if you don't ask you don't get, and he should NEVER be afraid to ask me anything, as I will fight his corner. We've had him virtualising our helpdesk, he's been giving the OLC a major kicking, he's been allocated a suite to maintain and he's doing a sterling job there, and he's adapted to dealing with "Teachervision" really well. He's also got the hang of my sense of humour, which not many people do.. I HAVE said "forget everything you learn here, it's irrelevant.". The new building will be an entirely new ballgame. New servers/workstations/systems/OS/procedures/Rules etc. We'll all be starting from scratch there, so he's at no disadvantage.

i'd settle for partial.

I've had a laptop back today, in shocking condition (TFT totally absent etc). Fired it up on my TFT, and it's been reinstalled totally.. Systeminfo gives me 7ish last night. I'm 98% sure of what I'm expecting..SO..what would/do you use to recover drives in situations like this? FileRescue Plus found a fair bit on clusterscan mode, but it won't do an entire disk rollback. Currently running Active disk recovery too..not much going on there though. Are there any decent linux distros for forensic data recovery? Cheers all!

We do some of it here, but in our new building (coming online in septemberish) we're going to pull the stops out. New kit throughout, all identical..so WOL etc is go there. LAN Projectors, so centralised shutdown possible Building management system, so electric windows, intelligent lighting, heat regeneration systems, ground source heating, 3 wind turbines, rainwater harvesting etc Mass virtualisation of servers using ESXi and so on, and so on. Looking forward to being able to shut the building down (literally) by remote if needs be. I'm going to get myself lost in the tech/management side of it, as it'll all run back to the server room behind my office. Another recommendation for the plug-in monitors here - both at work and home. I just had a quarterly power bill for £43..heh. And that was us being lazy, at that. One thing I will miss from here is our "big red switch" system - we had the suites cabled to our design, with 2 ring mains...1 for PCs, 1 for screens. If you want the kids attention, hot the switch and kill the TFTs. Same at night too, it's lovely. Shame it's not been specced in the new one.