Sirbendy

thats a good point...! Hah. "Welcome to Office 2012", bloatware edition...hmm..

Nice..Thought about an in-car PC, but Winters dark nights have sapped my energy.. I could alway sellotape my Inspiron to the dash..

Got it at home....like it lots. I'm not using it though...not the fault of Mediaportal itself. I have a Pinnacle PCTV Rave! TV card, and it doesn't work with it. I'm more inclined to blame the awful driver support to be honest. That said, I have a nice copy of XP MCE sat in my bedside table..and no, that also doesn't work with it!

Nah...UBCD is PEBuilder as a base, with a "toolkit" bolted on. Lets put it this way...WinPE is something MS wouldn't release for free..

Ah, but the same could be said for PE...no work required if you go for UBCD..it's just nice if you want something to do the job, without having to re-learn Linux just to do a fix.. As for UBCD, yes, I have one of those too..

We do the SWS report, I then simplify and screenshot it, annotate it, remove the junk that SWS adds and package it for the deputy head, who takes it from there. It creases me...female staff and female dep. head, and I hand them reports full of "animal, vegetable or mineral" porn (soft and hard), and I hear "oh my goodness!", or "I couldn't sleep after viewing that", or "oh my god"... I can't say anything surprises of shocks me these days..I usually end up rotating the images and uttering "how the hell did they get into THAT position?..Interesting...". The looks I get..hahaha....

go for it.. No problems here!

One sec...I'll poke the CCTV server. OK...all our machines are named "taw900wxxx" where xxx is the numeric ID. Here is the "Internet on" script: net use i: \\taw900w%1\c$ cacls i:\progra~1\intern~1\iexplore.exe /e /p students:r cacls i:\windows\system32\mshtml.dll /e /p students:r cacls i:\progra~1\window~3\wmplayer.exe /e /p students:r cacls i:\progra~1\window~3\mplayer2.exe /e /p students:r cacls i:\windows\system32\atl.dll /e /p students:r net use i: /delete Here's the "internet off" script: net use i: \\taw900w%1\c$ cacls i:\progra~1\intern~1\iexplore.exe /e /d students cacls i:\windows\system32\mshtml.dll /e /d students cacls i:\progra~1\window~3\wmplayer.exe /e /d students cacls i:\progra~1\window~3\mplayer2.exe /e /d students cacls i:\windows\system32\atl.dll /e /d students taskkill /s taw900w%1 /im iexplore.exe net use i: /delete I have them saved as "on.bat" and "off.bat" respectively. Literally, to "ban" the net on..say w133, you'd type "off 133", then "on 133" to enable it again. I then just wrote another batch file script to prompt with a text menu for the 4 suites, and to choose between "on" and "off". Literally, the batch file just calls "on" or "off" with the machine numbers I want to do, one after the other. (it also kills Windows Media Player, and Mplayer classic. Just a personal hatred)

I thought about it, but at the time I was on dialup.. PEbuilder just gave me the tool to use what I had on hand. I have...several Linux liveCDs in my pack. However, PEbuilder is all preset with the programs we use, so it's just a case of "grab 'n' go"..

Just thought I'd suggest PEBuilder to the good folks on here. Allows you to use an XP/2003 CD to create a bootable "live" CD for booting workstations with damaged XP/2003 installation. Can have many programs for anti spyware, malware, disk recovery, unerasing and ghosting "bolted on" to it. By far one of the most useful disks in my CD pack (for home as well as work use). Allows full access to NTFS as well. Find it here: http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

I disliked O2000 and OXP personally. Too damned bloated, and felt/acted flaky. O2003 is much better, but I use OO 2.0 at home.

We just grab a couple of machines in the office for repair (or we do keep one under the desk), do a quick ghost of XP, and let them loose on them as standalones for the lesson. When finished, we just re-image with a workstation build. Quick and nasty, but it works.. Actually....slap me about the face. I could do it with a VM machine and VMware player..hmm..

For my USB drive: Portable Firefox Abyss Web Server (http://www.aprelium.org), configured with PHP and SQL for web dev on the move WS_FTP (for uploads) RAdmin (since we use it for remote assistance) Portable Openoffice For my workstation VMWare (for testing builds) PE Builder (Windows PE on the cheap, ideal for system recovery/ghosting)

We use a script to map to the C of each machine in a suite (via batch file), and run CACLS to set permissions on IEXPLORE.EXE, MSHTML.DLL and a few others to deny student access, followed by taskkill to remove any instances of IE that may be running at the time. Takes 30-40 seconds to knock off a room, about the same to re-enable. Teacher-wise, I'm looking to develop a "nice" interface using an image map of the suites or similar. The kids really hate the script. *grin*

I've got XPSP2 running on a P100 at home as a fileserver...try NT4ing it..

The NGFL have a scheme in place in Telford where you stack up the old kit, fill in a form, and they'll remove it for you FOC and deal with the recycling. We cleared out all bar 10 of our p2 machines this summer, plus all the old junk we'd accumulated in store cupboards all over the building, all the naffy old monitors and dead Laserjet IIs etc. We pretty much filled up a stairwell. Nice now to have the space! It turns out that after NGFL took it all to a lockup, someone broke into it and nicked all the scrap kit..heh. Muppets.

We do the engrave/uv method. We've not had any machines nicked in 12 months or more..but we have had a projector taken. Someone waited for all 5 of us to leave, got in, found the way to the "old" ICT suite and removed the projector before the caretakers locked up. We all reckon ex student. I've been here 5 years and it doesn't ring a bell. He must have been here, as it's not marked how to get to IT, and he used the back way-hard to do unless you knkow the building, and a hell of a risk to take on the offchance. I've got him on our CCTV, wandering around the new suites (from his behaviour, they were new to him-12 months old), and trying to get into our office. Then her looks up, sees the cameras, and BANG!, He's off and running.

This is a PITA here as well..but NGFL are iffy about disabling it, due to accessibility requirements and guidelines. We're living with it for now..

We have a similar thing floating in the ether here......yes, a good way to create a "mobile" IT suite. However, as has been said..the repair/security side of things could be an arse. I wouldn't put it past some of our kids to have them on EBay by close of play.. I used to support one in my previous school, a GM Junior/Infant school in Shrewsbury. Not Intel laptops though-Apple eMate machines. Built in IR networking, Shockproof, waterproof, moulded handles, with keyboards and touchscreens. To be fair, I never had much need to look at them. The trolleys came in, got recharged, went back out. I liked them...if you wanted a class collaboration lesson, sit the kids in a circle and the laptops did the rest. If you wanted a field trip, the kids could take them and drop them in streams etc. If they needed to print, then you just aimed the IR port at the IR printers. The main problem I found was the touchscreens failing. We never had any nicked or wilfully damaged, but they were very hot on guarding them.

"Overworked"-can I suggest you look at Abyss web server, from http://www.aprelium.com? It's a tiny little Win32 web server, rather like apache. It's free, and we use ours with PHP, SHTML, ASP, and SQL, on an XP Pro box. I can't think why it wouldn't work on other NT/2003 based systems. Just a thought-it's what I intend to use to play with MRBS from my USB drive tonight-I have the entire school intranet/extranet on there, with web server..

ROFL! Is it an S2100 by any chance? We have several. Bag of shite. I sometimes have 8-9 tries to fire them up...and a lot of the time, yes it involves removing power, counting to 10 and trying to catch it unawares. We've installed ground level switches for them to make this easier.. I've spoken to Sahara-they think ballast failure. Loadsa dosh. But..since I have the "magic touch", they usually work for me. I also have a rarely used NEC VT440 that does the same trick. Our VT560s are solid as rock. However, our new Hitachi EDX-4000s are prove to spontaneous overheats needing a total power off/on cycle to recover.

Yes, we've had them moved around...little sods. I love the "it wasn't me!", followed by the CCTV playback...then all we get is "Thats shady..". One of the kids had been told the CCTV wasn't live, so he pulled a moonie at the cameras...with a deputy head in the office with us. He was mortified! Mind you, on his years leaving presentation, everyone else had past pics on the projection screen..he had a metre high pic of his arse.. We will get revenge..somehow.

They're Cisco units, managed by NGFL... They've probably turned it off-it DID work up until summer, when some "essential maintenance" took place.. Unfortunatly, we don't get access to our switches..it's in the hands of those monkeys. We're using unmanaged D-Links in the new suites... Can't naff those up.

You do? We didn't! Just a "Well done-you can crimp a cable"...whoopdedoo..

Really? We have SWS 3.0.x, and the NGFL create the LDAP users. We then have to put them into SWS, and it's a painful 1 by one process...we've looked, and the NGFL looked, and couldn't find it? Mind you..thats not saying much.heh. I agree with the support etc. We've also had issues where kids have had to be removed and re-entered for their filtering to become effective-SWS sometimes just seems to get a mental block.