Jamman960

How well is it working? I can see it working fairly well between lessons with teachers telling students when to leave etc but surely you need something at the end of break/lunch etc

Hmm will have to give that one a go. The activation key and details are held within the HKEY_Current_User part of the registry, storing this within Local_Machine would resolve this issue entirely. I've spoken to the company and they've said they'll look into per machine activation... I won't hold my breath. The DT teacher has contacted them and requested a refund but they're saying that as all of the licences have been activated they can't provide a refund as per the terms and conditions will have to have a read on monday...

We currently use Smartfilter - it bolts on to ISA server. I think we pay around £9.50 or so per pc. James

Thanks for this, I've never got why they deem it nessesary to enable it by default - do they really thing the end user is going to clean the filter?

Debenhams usually do a good range of shirts ranging from cheap to bloody expensive - I usually go for the mid range Thomas Nash ones - they rarely need ironing

Our DT teacher decided to go out and buy 5 licences for this software and had me install it in the DT lab only to discover that it requires activation by every user which is also locked to the PC's hardware... their only suggestion is to create 1 generic login per pc. Has anyone else come accross this software and found a work around? I wish these teachers would evaluate software before purchasing...

Looks very similar to the Voyager school in Peterborough - these schools start off with some serious IT infrastructure, all of these new builds have been overseen by external support suppliers from what I've seen.

When I lived with my parents I had 3-4 pc's running all the time, 2 as servers(win2k3/linux) along with the good old smoothwall box and even had one running as a Ragnarok Online server - that was a great excuse to play with SQL server I generally do any testing on my laptop or work pc now, My wife would have a fit if I tried to setup more than 1 pc at home lol. I get enough grief if I bring home a pc to fix!

I'm currently looking into potential new phone systems and have got quotes for these two systems, at the moment the Siemens system is much cheaper by around 20k although the Aastra quote hasn't been broken down so I have no idea how much is taken up by their "GOLD" maintenance contract. I've had a demo of the Aastra system but haven't as yet seen the Siemens one, does anyone here look after a HiPath system and if so how do they perform? are they easy enough to manage? are there any quirky bits that annoy you? We're also interested in the CTI side of things, has anyone linked a HiPath system to exchange for contacts etc? Thanks, James

We currently have an SMTP relay provided by our webhost for around £200/year however I'm looking to move hosts due to our current host not being able to provide enough bandwidth to stream our new promotional video. Does anyone else pay for an external relay? the school had it setup long before I joined, I'm considering setting up the SMTP service on our other site to relay for our domain then configuring it as our secondary MX - the chances of both servers/connections being down is minimal and they're on seperate exchanges. James

Have you tried ActivInspire on them? I thought our teachers would hang on to ActivPrimary for dear life but after a few weeks of using Inspire I don't think theres more than 1 or 2 teachers still on ActivPrimary It seems to be alot more robust than AP3 so it may solve your problem

I currently use Sennheiser IE6's, they're a tad on the expensive side but VERY good. I managed to get them for £70 from one of the bigger catalog stores that offer £30 off your first order.. can't find the store now though

Getting value for money is still down to the individual in most cases, I generally get as many quotes as I can and then either play them off against each other or decide which one gives the most value for money(not always the cheapest) yet our Bursar has just had a quote from our phone provider and is prepared to go ahead and enter the school into a 7 year lease without a single comparitive quote because "they've been good over the last 9 years with the current system"

Failing that some of the cisco rack ears being sold on ebay are more or less universal mounts(presuming that the zone director is 1/2U)

Thats not a bad price to be honest, even as an independent school they'll still get educational discounts where availble, I don't think educational discounts are usually availible on OEM/Retail licences though? I thought they only really come into play with things like the schools agreement and select/volume licensing. Also some places will do discounts for charitys so that may be worth looking into although I've usually found that the educational discounts are often slightly better than those offered to charitys.

Seriously? I don't think I've ever come accross a networked setup that bad, even the smallest school I've visited had a semi-reasonable server to support their 16 laptops & 2 admin pc's(a VERY small village primary with less than 50 pupils). The fact that they've taken on an IT Tech should mean that they're looking to improve the situation. I'd begin by asking what their budget is for IT improvements or weather they're prepared to take on a lease to get it sorted out, at a guess I'd imagine half their workstations would need replacing and possibly their whole network infrastructure along with getting in a server etc. If they don't plan to or aren't open to improvements I'd run like the wind!

The latest installable release is the March Main release, Just found the link... http://dl.capitasolus.co.uk/cdimage/SIMS2009MarchMain.zip

Subspace Continuum always goes down well

Do they have smartboards elsewhere? A long time ago they allowed their software to be used on any board for free, a company I worked for installed promethean boards and then installed the smart software for the teachers to use as the promethean software wasn't up to scratch at the time. The school even phoned up Smart to confirm and they reluctantly told the school it was ok. They have since put a clause into their terms and conditions to say that you can't use it on non SMART products. I'd presume they wouldn't mind it being installed on other computers within the school as long as they don't have a competitors board attached. I'm pretty sure Prometheans stance is that for every board you buy you can install their software on 5 PC's, SMART may be the same.

Must admit I'd never have the sims updating process fully automated, I always wait a while before deploying the latest version etc but having it push the updates to pcs rather than clients being updated when the user wants to use the program should make a big difference. At the moment the "Head of IT" here wants me to update the pc's myself to avoid having teachers wait 20mins before they can use sims in the mornings. Having the PC's woken up during the night and updated would be ideal... currently the only time I get away with updating is outside of term time.

Provided they are universal there are a couple of things to take into account when replacing a projector, you need to ensure the throw distance is roughly the same(projector point will help with this) as different projectors produce different size images at varying distances, the last thing you want to be doing is having the pole moved. You'll also ideally want to get a projector with the bulb on the same side as the original otherwise the image might not quite fit on the board correctly.

I'd be very interested in taking part, it sounds like it'll take alot of the headaches away from the updating process.

At the beginning of term last week one of our languages teachers reported a dancing bear randomly appearing on her screen during lessons(with actions!), I had a quick look and couldn't find any evidence of this and thought nothing of it... I got called to her last lesson yesterday to find that "BBC Barnaby Bear Tours the UK" had loaded up from the recently installed Sherston Megapack... it turns out that all shortcuts created by the resourcepack program include CTRL+ALT+A as a keyboard shortcut, being a languages teacher she had been regularly using accents on letters and thus launching Barnaby Bear. Her various descriptions of what happens are hilarious, apparently it had happened at least 4 times yesterday during the day, she'd be teaching a class at it'd just pop up behind her on the board. She didn't report it again until a pupil told her it might be a virus. Guess I'll have to spend a while manually altering the shortcuts seeing her do a Bear dance is worth it though lol

I'd seriously consider getting headphones without microphones unless you have a real need for them, I see far too many pupils with the mics in their mouths sucking on the end. I've also found that the mic arm is one of the more common things to break first

if you havent already try adding the reg key to Computer configuration > Security settings > Registry and giving students write permissions on it. That may work (all done on the workstation GPO) Programs are able to read the registry without access to regedit, the only time it should be needed is if the program is trying to import an entry each time it loads.