BatchFile

Thanks for that, that's pretty much what I thought. It's a bit more complicated than that as a group of schools are looking at buying together and negotiations are already progressing on the price; we're just trying to gauge if it's worth our while or not.

Bump

Yeah I was thinking the gadget that lets office 2003 open 2007+ file types - that sometimes does funny things if it's on a system where it's not needed and it's just the sort of thing that I'd put in a GPO and forget about!

Immediate thoughts are my documents redirected to a location where the user doesn't have full control? Format convertor getting in the way (but I would expect that more with 2003) - is it installed by mistake? Could also try giving users on a couple of machines local administrator access - to rule out an over zelous security policy messing things up. These intermittant issues are a serious pain to track down - you have my sympathy!

All, Does anyone use Espresso (content not coffee) and clipbank in a secondary school? is it used and is it worth it? I've been asked to look into it by the Head but I've only ever heard of it in a Primary School context. Cheers in advance!

I've never used VLANs before - is there an idiots guide somewhere? I've got Ruckus to authenticate with AD, no worries, and without the VLAN settings it's getting IP addresses from a DHCP server and, when the proxy settings are put in manually, all is well. I'm thinking one way to proceed now is: 1. set a spare port on a managed switch to be a new VLAN 2. connect a smoothwall transparent proxy with DHCP, which I've used before to add a proxy setting where the client device didn't support it, to it 3. set that VLAN to the BYOD Network in Ruckus How does that sound? will that then give a client device an IP from Smoothwall and allow it to access the web? or have I fundamentally missed a point or two along the way? edit: I've just read through the thread again and it looks as if I've hijacked it - mods if you want to move this to a new thread that's fine by me!

Thanks all! In the end, with a little cooperation from our ISP, I've done it with a sharepoint server, which didn't cost much (used recycled hardware and had a spare server license in any case) and was actually surprisingly easy to set up. Anyone that wants it can have it (I just create a site for everyone that asks, with appropriate permissions, and add a calendar which is then their diary), it's in it's own domain and facing outwards only, without ever touching our internal network and connects seamlessly to Outlook 2007+. It's also available for anything else we choose to throw at it in the future as we drift towards paperlessness, as it's better that our VLE (MOODLE) for doing calendars, workflows etc.

I'm going through the Ofsted "Inspecting E-Safety September 2012" (no. 120196) document for the second time (as the first pass resulted it in it becoming a PM target:rolleyes:) and I thought I'd just ask what everyone else is doing regarding this bit on page 5: How do you demonstrate that you are "monitor[ing] its impact systematically"? if the e-safety training is working, surely problems are being avoided and so not occurring - there's no control group...

Afternoon all, We've just appointed a new Head's PA, who wants to convert the Head's diary to Outlook 2010 (from paper). She therefore needs to set up delegate access; which we can't find. We don't have an exchange server - is that the reason why it's not appearing where it should? Is it possible to share a calendar without an exchange server (possibly also synchronising with an android tablet at a later date, too)?

Ok, I've just come in for a "couple of hours" to tidy up a bit and check things are working, and I've found that the SIMS (etc.) server has disappeared off the network. Cause:It's got 3 HDDs, Raid 5: One is ok , One is working but with a SMART error , One has failed. and it had bluescreened and couldn't find anything to boot off as the RAID had been marked unusable. After resolving the "unusable" to "Degraded", I've replaced the failed one and it's currently rebuilding which will take about 12 hours. The RAID is split into two partitions; one that boots, holds SIMS and Sage is ok, the other, which holds teacher filestores etc. is trashed and needs chkdisking at the very least, presumably because of the error on the "failing" disk, after the failed one had failed. I've got the vast majority, of the data off the corrupt partition (though not all, due to an unrelated problem:rolleyes:) in a backup, which is currently being restored temporarily to a different server so I'm just after making things easier for myself here: once the dust has settled, should I replace the "failing" disk and THEN run chkdsk, or the other way round?

the last place I worked in had a fancy coffee machine, because the kettle was removed as it failed to meet their acceptable risk assessment criteria:rolleyes: won't say where it was, but they write and support a well known MIS...

I thought it but didn't dare say it...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/araldite-DIY-Tools/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A79903031%2Ck%3AAraldite

Match Abandoned 'Unable to access Registration Wizard' So... DIDA software won't run on Windows 7 (or Vista, come to that), Serif Webplus (used for DIDA) won't run on XP X64... So It'll have to be XP X86, which wasn't particularly stable on this hardware last time I tried:rolleyes: Thank it's Friday!

Giving that a go now

I'm trying to get the serif suite working on XP X64 edition as a short term fix till next June when I can put Win7 X64 on, but the installer won't even try to install into it, failing with an error message that it will only work on 32 bit XP or (any) Vista. (I've had it working on 7 X64 too, without this problem) What I want to try is either bypassing this check, or reporting a different version of Windows to it, and installing it anyway, to see what happens as everything else is fine in this image.

I'm trying to get the serif suite working on XP X64 edition as a short term fix till next June when I can put Win7 X64 on, but the installer won't even try to install into it, failing with an error message that it will only work on 32 bit XP or (any) Vista (I've had it working on 7 X64 too, without this problem). Does anyone have any idea how to spoof serif into thinking it's on XP X86 when actually it is on X64? Or bypass the version check when it's installing? I realise that we might not get peak performance from it, but I'd like it to at least try! (I'd bet that it will be fine, but nobody thought anybody would try - it works fine on X64 Vista and 7 - but other stuff we need doesn't) I've thought along the lines of making one big MSI for the lot on a x86 machine to deploy, but I spent an hour and a bit on that this afternoon and screwed up at the end anyone got a better way?

It's truly bizzare - it's not like it even has a data store AFAIK so what on earth a routine to delete whole directory trees is doing in there is beyond me and why 7 and 8 of the same software should be ok is just... baffling. And this is when the program is being RUN - not installed or uninstalled! All I can think is that other titles (ICT4Life, DIDA) that do have a data store use the same wrapper.exe but (whilst they are as buggy as hell) they don't behave quite like this! Moving on, any suggestions as to how I get the damnd thing to behave - a VM (either the M$ XP one or a virtualbox) is about the only thing I've come up with...

As this forum is for "Having a problem with the stange quirkes which you encounter in many educational software titles?", this one might just get the award! I've just given (in July) our head of science a new Win7 laptop with all the usual sciency stuff on it (Exploring Science 7,8 and 9 for KS3; 21st Century Science for KS4) all of which have worked for years on XP in the past. He'd logged a call on the help forum (where the well behaved staff log cases, rather than ringing us, stopping us in the corridor, sending kids, shout out of the.... ok another story for another day) saying that Exploring Science wasn't working on his laptop. I went to have a look, and proceeded to set the compatibility settings on wrapper.exe to XP SP3, which worked fine (as it kind of did on the similarly structured DIDA stuff) on 7 and 8, but then when I did 9 it froze at a white screen with nothing on it. when I killed wrapper.exe with task manager, there was only the recycle bin on the desktop, a black desktop background rather than the theme pic... so I restarted explorer: no change. Sims was running at the time as he was due to take a register in 5 mins, so I said do your register then reboot it, which he did - then brought it down to me as it was failing to boot with a BSOD. (this gets stranger) Booted off a windows CD to do startup repair: no joy. Booted off a PE pendrive and ran chkdsk: nothing major, no joy. Looked at what was on c: (still in PE): very little! the only stuff left on C: is what was in use at the time - it's as if you'd run cmd and typed rd /q /s c:\ (we're not done yet) so I reimaged it (I don't have a specific image for him with the 8+ CDs of content but do have a general one for the laptop) and copied all the CDs back in (all the stuff runs from the CD folders - it's how we've always done it) thinking that however unlikely it was that running ES9 could have caused the problem this morning, but also having just spent 2 hours copying the data back in, I ghosted it before I did anything else. Thinking that some little $h17 had replaced the wrapper.exe with a batch file or something that would erase the C: drive, but not taking any chances, I did ES9 first - and blow me it happened again - and that's straight of the CD - erased the hard disk apart from what was running:confused:! I restored the ghost image I'd made, and tried a different tack: installing it using setup.exe rather than going straight for wrapper.exe: same result as before "library not registered" without compatability mode, empty hard drive with compatibility mode! Has, erm anyone else seen this, or am I going doolally?!

As the school production is looming, I've been asked to order some radio microphones as ours are now illegal since all the frequencies changed during digital switchover (there does, unsurprisingly, now seem to be more interference on the ones we've got).I need at least three receivers and belt packs, plus a hand held mic (currently we have a dB VH210M2 for this) and receiver... but I don't really know where to start as, although I do have a theatre technical background, I'm a lighting man and although I can hold the sound desk together during a show I've never bought or specced kit for it before! Do you buy them as a "matched set", or as individual bits and match up the frequencies, or what?; and where from?!Someone must have done this recently as all radio mics over a couple of years old will have this issue soon or already.(too embarrassed to post in the blue room till I know what I'm asking)

I wouldn't, YOU'LL end up in A+E having spines removed from yourself!... maybe a tickle under the tummy...

With 10 year old cars it's often a case of follow your gut instinct, get as much warranty as you can and to misquote Monty Python "don't forget to haggle"! When I was looking recently I put together the attached checklist to take with me when looking at cars as it's all too easy to get swept away in the moment and miss something - use and abuse it if it's any use - and if you're not sure what any of the checks or items on the sheet are post em here and we'll explain them (the bits about freewheeling hubs and transfer boxes are because I was thinking about a 4x4 at the time) Used car checklist.docx

No joy I'm afraid it's not hanging on startup, it's crashing and closing after approx 2 mins use

No, not right away but I haven't tried the compatibility settings yet

It's a mess, and you'll probably want an X64 server before long if only to host the printers! you can do it though if you "install" the printer on to the x64 workstations "connected" to LPT2, then put a batch file with a net use command in the startup group to connect to the printer.