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I kitted out a room full of iMac's back in April, we went for the 20inch models and they came in at just under £1000 ex VAT, with DVD writers, 1GB RAM and 250GB HD. We also went for Final Cut Express HD and Final Cut Studio (Final Cut Pro 5, Soundtrack Pro, Motion 2 and DVD Studio Pro 4) which are cheaper if you get them on a volume license! Also, although these are meant to be pro apps, the majority of our kids picked it up really easily. We start off with iMovie, teach them the basics of production, then introduce more advanced stuff. We also have 14" iBooks, the 1.42GHz variety will edit SD video no problems but struggle with HD, so think about that before you buy. We use the G5 iMac's and a pair of Dual G5's for HD stuff. What is also worth thinking about is that Apple will be moving from PPC chips to Intel chips sometime in 2006, if you're going to invest heavily then you might want to wait. I have a 17" G4 1.5Ghz powerbook, yes it looks very nice, but essentially it does with the iBooks do, although I love the backlit keyboard Oh, the iBooks have the sudden motion detector, which is handy as kids like to drop laptops! What we have found is that going down the mac road is an expensive business, but with good teachers and techs that know what they're doing, the quality of work produced is amazing.

So you're dismissing the intel macs before you've even seen them? Just because it's a new product doesn't mean it's going to be plagued with bugs on release, Jobs knows what is riding on the transition to intel. Apple have been playing with intel hardware for a while now and have kept mirror versions of x86 OS X internally up to date with the PPC releases.

Whoops, my fault for not reading properly In that case, I do think it's a shame you can't transfer the licence! Just out of curiosity, why did you by a new license and not upgrade, theres some big savings to be made, did you pay around £2000? Upgrade licenses are around £1000.

Personally I would have waited till the new year for the DVR version running on intel... oh well!

Just because the software is sat on a shelf doesn't give you the right to use it once upgraded. Remember the Studio upgrade is heavily discounted because you've already forked out for the previous version. The fact Macromedia haven't asked for you to return the CD's etc doesn't mean you can sell it on, I think you'll find that once upgraded the previous license in also void.

Also, if you haven't bought an upgrade license and it is indeed the full license check the terms of the agreement. Many have clauses forbidding you to re-sell the license granted to you.

This is the Yagi in question, it's 76mm x 851mm, not huge, but not small. The brickwork is sound and i won't be going into any mortar, just brick.

Well the antenna is only 1.2KG but it's going up a 6ft pole so it needs to be fairly secure! I'm using these as the brackets, so there's 4 fixing points. Thanks for your suggestions, i'm going to have a word with our electrician also, he's put some cabinets up for us so he might have some ideas!

Don't know if this is quite the right place to ask but i've got to put up an aerial up on an outside wall. It's going into brick, does anyone have anything they recommend to screw into brick with? I've found these Rawbolts, but it doesn't say if they are for use on brick, anyone?

I can recommend the Dell PowerConnect 5324's, they have 24 Gigabit Copper Ports and 4 SFP slots to add fiber connectivity if needed. The switch fabric is 48GBps which means each ports has the ability to operate at full duplex 100% of the time (some cheaper switches dont switch internally at 2GBps per port). It has Auto MDI/MDIX, EEE 802.1p tagging and DCSP for QoS. The list price on the Dell website is £666 but I got ours down to £399 after sweet talking my rep.

Dammit ninjabeaver, you just beat me to that!

I've seen this before, but im having trouble saving the text. What i think is happening is that the encoding of the text was in something other than western. Then the font has been changed and it isn't matching up with the character map of the wester fonts on the system (if that makes sense). If you select all the text and change the font to "Symbol" it kind of makes sense, i can see the following sentences: "I looked in the window of the bakery..." "I wanted to taste the..."

Are you really sure you want Unmanaged Gigabit switches? Dell sell Managed PowerConnect 5324's at around £400, I've just moved our network over to 5324's and 6024's. The CLI is like Cisco's IOS and there's an easy web interface to configure them too. With the managed switches you'll be able to monitor with SNMP, set up VLAN's etc, even secure the switches on a per port basis.

oh and a nice robots.txt User-Agent: * Disallow: /

A friend of mine who works in a school had an ancient server that broke one day through lack of money being available to upgrade etc. The Headmaster wanted the network back up and running ASAP so he was ordered to buy a server from stock (wasnt allowed to wait the 5-7 days for a Dell build) and ended up with some shoddy compaq/hp that had been on a shelf for months and had old hat hardware. After a few months this server reached its capacity and things started to slow down and fall over, again the headmaster released funds to buy an additional server. What I dont understand is why does everything have to be on it's last legs for money to be made available! If the head had just released both sets of money and given the tech time, they could have had a well specced server that would have lasted far longer than the two they have now!

In my experience it could be down to either, I've seen old Dell Inspiron laptops fail like this but that was due to a design fault in the hinges. I've also seen it from miss use where staff have dropped the laptop etc. Unless there's a sure fire way to prove the laptop was dropped you may have to absorb the cost of fixing it.

We used to get it all the time on a haggard old Laser printer. "Load Letter" is it asking for US style Letter paper!

Also, if you have managed switches, try turning off Spanning Tree Protocol on the port the machine is connected to. STP was doing weird things on our switches when our machines we're trying to get an address with RIS.

Can I just ask, do you disable access to the C:\ drive for your pupils? Can an admin user save OK?

Damn, you've got a point!

With my BOFH hat on i'd remove the toner from the printer near that nice lady and replace it with anthrax :twisted:

How old is it? Can i hell find any info on it!

It's *hers*? Show some of that BOFH authority and move it

Good point, what *should* happen is that when you connect to a contact it'll try and connect to that persons IP address. So if the person on the other end is on your LAN the video traffic shouldn't go out on to the internet. I don't have it installed anymore, you might just want to download it and give it a try!

I've used SightSpeed, it works, but to be honest netmeeting does the same job!