Sirbendy

same here..

Depends if you ask my missus, or year 11..

This is why my missus had a chat to her boss, and he agreed to buy her a new Vostro X2 laptop with XP and the 4 year support package..heh. All paid back now, so it's hers. She had a bad key on it when it arrived, and support talked her through removing and refitting the keyboard, then sent a new one out next day for her to fit herself. Impressive. Especially when you consider to replace the KB on my ancient Inspiron 3800 they wanted me to RTB it, and said "no home fit option, and loads of money, ta"..

poke the boot.ini as well, make sure that's OK.

AC/DC FTW..

My mother-in-laws partner has a cranial high pressure condition, and she's really sensitive to loads of things (I say put-on..). She was dead against me installing wifi in their house because "OMG, I read that it really exacerbates my condition".. We installed it on the QT, and next time she brought it up, I asked if her head had exploded yet..no? Well, there you go then. You've had it for a month. In fact, your head would have exploded in my flat as well, as I have wifi there too. We have APs all over the building, and nobody complains. My mother was panicking about it when I wifi'd her house..I said it's either that, or I drill holes and run cable. She's stopped worrying now.. We've never had APs used as weapons...we did find our office one sporting a Durex latex jacket...when I enquired as to why this had been done by the student who came forward, he said "protection from viruses, sir..". Both me and the NM fell over laughing. It's a DLink DWL 2100AP that was given to us, so we couldn't bring ourselves to tell him off.

Only on page 2, and "tit" has made an appearance in the thread..:D I know, I know...I'm a child.

I say yes, more women! Although, yes, it is sexist. My missus did a year as IT tech at a secondary...she was constantly "talked down" to, and frequently had people go past her to the males in her dept...and with my Missus, that's not clever (or wise). After a year, she was at the "I'm going to bloody kill the NM" stage, and she was that down and generally low-level angry/frustrated that I suggested a change of career..she's now a full time web developer/php/sql coder at a close-knit small firm local to us, and she's never been happier. She said she'd never go back into schools IT unless she had no choice.

I say video driver - make sure it's up to date. We have Clevo's that do this...

it'd look good with a BSOD on it, yep...

good call - have a chat with your caretakers and see if you can acquire an old cupboard or similar, then open the back of it to the sockets and screw the thing to the wall, then padlock it shut. It's how we did the presentation system in our theatre..Everything lives in the cupboard, the CRT is screwed to it, the sockets are covered by it, and it's kensington'd to the wall with a ruddy great hasp lock keeping people out. Best answer we've ever had down there.

I always start with a fresh XP install every year, install flash/Shockwave/JRE, Realplayer etc, codec pack, PDF reader/writer and all the basics and packages. Then I join it to the domain, install Office 2003 with transforms, AV, Set up outlook and so on. Then I set no swapfile, remove Sys restore points, remove any hibernate file and defunct junk, copy the drivers and sysprep folder over preconfigured. The "Finish" folder goes in and contains a batch file that runs post sysprep to execute regmerges to set swap, cleartype, and run any other "additional" programs off a networked drive that may be needed "between image revisions". Then nip into device manager and set the HAL back to "standard PC" and let it reboot with all that. Then sysprep, boot off PEbuilder and ghost the base image. Hal independance is great..at some point, maybe the LEA will catch up. It's not hard to stick the HAL lines in sysprep to have the machine figure itself out, after all. No WDS servers, no PXE booting...not upto us at this point. We just make do with ghostcaster. Can do an entire suite in an hour or so..good enough.

No bent pins in the NIC socket? Nothing shorting? As said, slap another NIC into it and see what happens..

We use a Pinnacle moviebox/pinnacle dazzle and Pinnacle studio that came with it..VHS in one end, other into USB, and bingo. I also have an old analogue TV card in my workstation with a VCR plugged into it, and I record from that direct into movie maker.

it's threatening in telford as well, for Friday. Yippee...not...it'd be yippee if I wasn't driving. Last time, the head stated "we'll stay open, no matter what"...it took me 3 hours to do the 10 minute run home (live in a valley). Gritting, no. Clearing, no. Abandoned cars everywhere? oh yes. I don't mind the actual driving..I used to go and see the missus on those days where it was "don't go out unless absolutely necessary" on the radio...abandoned roads and heavy snow makes for fun. It's other drivers..skidding, wheelspinning and sliding all over the shop...so many younger drivers out there have little or no experience of snow driving..I saw so many sliding backwards around roundabouts and playing dodgems... Snow mode proved it's worth there...no wheelspin for me! Heh. Doesn't help the road to my flat is subsiding badly, and it's like a multi-camber rally course with a sheer drop on one side into the river.. I'd like to see the cats reaction to his first snow though..that could be fun.

I'm looking to move flat in about a month, and I'm considering changing ISP (tiscali 2mb unlimited)..anyone out there got any recommendations? Needs to be cheap, reliable, lots of headroom (missus is a professional webdev) and not lose VPN/RDP/E-mail/FTP at peak times like Tiscali can...ideally not a 12 month contract either, as it depends how things go at the new place. Needs to be ADSL as well, as I know there's a BT line in, but I doubt we'll be able to change provider. Any recommendations? I *could* stay with Tiscali, but since their recent "throttling/port block" problems, and their telling me that using VPN/RDP/FTP and E-mail clients is "business usage suited to a business package instead of a home one"..I'm losing faith TBH. Any recommendations from you knowledgeable IT types out there?

oops, here's me with this degauss gun...oh dear, it went off. Heyho..

I use Avast! free on most of mine and Jems..the only fly in the ointment is that on my dual core X2 3800 it locks up firefox and the machine at random whilst surfing, so it's currently without AV.

Ah, other people do the sysprep method! And the HAL change. I'm so glad - i thought it was just me..

They are funny here...I know we have a bit of a rep around local schools, but bless them, they're essentially good kids with a good sense of humour. Whenever we go to the secondary tech meetings, we bring up a list of failings our kids have found or hacks they've accomplished, and the LEA/NGFL/other schools just look shocked. Such things as "if you pull the cat5 out of the PC at just the right moment in the login process, you can get local admin access to the machine", and "BTW, is this your local admin password on the domain? One of the kids used LOPHCrack in the community library and found it.." We had one incident last year where someone jumped over the fence and threatened a year 10...they were taken away in an ambulance, as unfortunatly, Year 11 weren't far away and they all piled in. Also had the "all out turf war" with a neighbouring school..lunchtime, the school is silent. We all look at each other and whisper "uh-oh.."..then we see the kids all going hell for leather across the field towards the school shouting "OPEN THE BLOODY DOORS!"..they all piled in, ran to classrooms and sat trying to look innocent. One class said to me "If anyone asks, we were here all the time, OK sir?" When I asked why..."We were decking the other lot, and the police arrived... They let the dogs out...that's why we were running...".. The sight of the entire school doing the "who? US? No, we were here..mud? What mud? oh, THAT? No idea....." was absolutely priceless..

We're too high up here. However, at home we live pretty much next to the severn at ironbridge. Went for a walk last night..pubs under water again, Ironbridge is closed off, water's damn close to the new bridge again. Fingers crossed it drops soon. http://www.shropshirestar.com/2008/01/latest-reader-flooding-photos/7/ That's the pub.

1. Keyboard letters swapped round to form swearwords 2. Kids that lean on my "service hatch" and say "WOW, this door is thick!". We always respond with "Suits you.."...it's only a shelf on a normal door.. 3.The repeated cries of "I had yer mum last night", and "yer mum", "yer mum", "I had yer nan", then usually a smack as the first kid hauls off...got to love "fight club" as they're known. 4. One of the more physical Year 11s last year who evicted a pond dweller from our office with a punch, and a well executed "throw him through the doorway" move. 5. A kid that stood here and told the head we should "Switch to open source instead of the Joke that is Windows, and spend the license money on improving the student resources"..bless, I creased. 6. Kids that got wise to SMT's cheapo radios, and got some from tesco on the same channel..calling SLT out to spoof calls, and randomly belching down their sets..

Ah yes. We get it a lot. Some of it is "CBA to think, you do it for me" Some of it is sheer lack of confidence Some of it is terror of damaging something Some of it is being afraid to use it in front of the kids incase they end up looking stupid. SMARTboards are a biggie..especially for, shall we say, the more seasoned staff. They tend to need things breaking down into small chunks and for me to be sitting with them and saying "don't worry - you won't break it". I've now got some of our oldest staff using them in every lesson with wireless presenters etc..heh. USB keys - yes..get that too. Some of it is down to our setup though...XP attempting to allocate letters in use to the network/U3 tomfoolery. The rest is down to fear of making a mistake..at which point I explain the benefits of backups and shadow copy (fairly impossible to make a terminal cockup), and reassure them of the fact that if the PC did fail, I could have it back up and running in 30 minutes with no data lost. Some programs aren't used, purely down to lack of time, and lack of wanting to play with them. Laptops..they're afraid of. It takes a fair bit of reassurance that it's just a normal PC, but a bit smaller needing some extra common sense to care for it. But, I get that with my mother, so.. I have to say, ours are fairly good..although I do keep meaning to do some "tutorial" videos and captivate "user guides", along with some PDF ones for the less dynamic stuff, linked on the intranet. Sometimes, *I* don't have enough time..sigh. Although I have (for a joke) provided a PDF guide to "caring for and feeding your office stapler"..as we get so many broken ones due to hamfistedness, it's ridiculous. It was the last straw when one member of staff stapled her finger..H&S anyone? Surprisingly, several staff now have the guide, and my printed copy has wandered off..

We're wanting to trial wifi in our existing building for trolleys of 30 laptops, as "proof of concept" for engineering a similar system into our new academy building in 2009ish. At the moment we have a DLINK 2100AP in my office, this covers a fair radius of the middle floor considering it's sat inside the cab. We have a big DLink AP in our sports centre for outside e-portal access via PDA, and we seem to have sprouted another LEA one I can get on my IPaq in our library. As a proof of concept, would using APs like these in various areas around the building, along with our laptops/IPaqs to test range and strength be a workable solution anyone would practise, as opposed to getting someone in? We HAVE used them for laptop access before - it seemed passable. Only lightly loaded though..1 or 2 machines at once. They all link back into Cisco 3550 (IIRC) switches. I have seen schools local to us that have had LEA installed Wifi, and I've heard a lot of horror stories..but we could do with at least 1 extra "ad hoc" IT facility, and if it was portable so much the better..

We bought 90 GX60s a few years back...we have 5 original PSUs left. All blew their caps, orange flickering mainboard light, random powerup/downs. Dell alternately denied all knowledge, said "isolated incident" etc...I got through to one Irish tech who was about to leave the company, and he said "oh, we know. TH series supplies - good luck. Bad batch, we've been told to replace all TH-02 serial supplies if asked. GX60s and 260/270s mainly. But I didn't officially say that." In the end I got hold of our account manager and shredded him, and sent pics of every failed PSU opened up showing the crusty caps...and he said "OK..yes, it's a bad batch..here's what we'll do..."..and got new PSUs shipped to us. CN series - looks a far better vented unit. No probs with those at all. I still like Dell...they have SOME decent, honest techs there...unfortunatly they have a lot of scripted, unhelpful and useless ones.