Jamman960

Brilliant game! used to play it as a student and currently have the pupils at school playing it during lunch times/last few IT lessons of the year Continuum - Meet people from all over the world...then kill them. Liero/Wurmz is also pretty good - last time I looked I couldn't find a good version that works well with xp

We went for the GNR's also - all others were either much more expensive or were very difficult to find stock of. Although the Hanns G ones were still around I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole - I found their normal TFT's to be top heavy and unbalanced in the past... I'd bet their glass fronted ones are even worse. To top it off their build quality is also pretty poor.

Rolling back shouldn't be a problem however its not possible to roll back specific modules, you would also end up rolling back attendance/lesson monitor I don't quite understand whats been done within fee's billing however as long as you haven't already processed the bills you should be able to undo whatever has been done. I'd contact capita before trying a roll back, then again if its only the AM registration etc that will be lost within sims there isn't much harm in rolling back.

We've only had 1 problem with ours so far which was caused by a faulty controller board which also blew 2 PSU's before being identified as faulty(it went from blowing PSU's to spiking) They're fairly simple devices when it comes to it, it might be worth finding out how much a new controller board would cost if one were to fail... other than that and PSU's there really isnt much to go wrong except in the case of physical damage to the membrane. If a board survives the initial warranty period I'd expect it to last until its old enough to be replaced anyway. James

If its a managed switch I'd check its uptime to see if its power is being cut , if the power is not being cut I'd use wireshark on a machine connected to the switch to see whats going on during the outage.

I've just had a 2nd EX4 bulb blow within 1000 hours/1 year on 2 different projectors, the filters have been cleaned a few times so shouldnt be blocked.... thankfully we have a 3 year lamp warrantee with the units. I had requested EX5 projectors for this years installs but thankfully our supplier has talked us into going for Sanyo XW57's with 3 year lamp warrantee's.

Data Integration Software - Data Protection Solutions - Disaster Recovery Software - Syncsort Software might be worth a look - it may way over your budget though

Why not go outside the LEA? there are many companies out there who will install a fully secured Vanilla network from the beginning and will provide whatever level of support you require or can afford.

I know of one school that brought Pocket PC's with the intention of using Sims mobile, apparently the extra costs were pretty high they abandoned the idea. James

The Dude does a good job of mapping, again only if SNMP is enabled on the switches. MikroTik Routers and Wireless

I think in the case of LA schools transfering equipment between themselves it may be deemed ok as ultimately the LA could be considered as the owner couldn't it? I'm not overly sure as I've never worked for a state school. You've got me thinking though - one of my suppliers sends PC's and other equipment from their customers to schools in abroad so they must have sorted out a WEEE licence of some sorts. Will have a word with them. James

I guess it all depends on how much cheaper W7 Starter edition is, Windows is still a large percentage of the cost of producing a netbook. It is a bit of a pathetic limitation but would not being able to change the background really bother anyone that much? I can't see a consumer opting to pay lets say £50 more for the "luxury" of being able to change the background. I'm sure there are more limitations to come but if this is the only limit they plan to put in place it probably won't affect sales a huge amount. I agree that its a very odd limitation and would love to hear the justification for it though.

You'll need to run simsinst.exe from the setups folder on the shared drive. You'll also want to run simsperm.bat to allow non admin users to upgrade their clients automatically. James

Some timetabling software does integrate although I'm not sure how that'd work with sims... they'd probably want to charge you for the patch to enable timetables in the first place

Free timetable software . . . for timetabling school timetables . . . for easier scheduling. looks interesting, never used it before though(first one that came up in a google search) We currently use NovaT6, prior to that Timetabler(not the above) was used, NovaT6 isnt too cheap but I think Timetabler was much cheaper(used before I joined). Why does the software need to be free? surely timetabling is a critical part of running a school and as such should be funded pretty much no matter the cost unless you've got someone with the time to spare. Even using nova takes our timetabler a few weeks to sort out even though we're not the biggest of schools. Edit, the above program is not actually free and looks as though its the same one we used before NovaT6. Our timetabler liked it either way - not sure why we switched over to Nova.

Does anyone know what it'd take or cost to become WEEE certified? or atleast certified enough to take ownership of PC's and guarentee that they'll be wiped to a satisfactory level? I keep meaning to look into it but never get round to it. I've got a few contacts in corperate IT, they are unable to donate pc's they are getting rid of to schools/charities due to the extra hastle it involves and the potential come backs. If a school could approach such companies and offer to take working pcs for free and provide the nessesary legal bits so that its all above board I'm sure a few corperates would be willing to cooperate. I guess you'd need to be willing to take a serious number of pc's to make it worth their time though. Then again even the smaller schools have 50+ workstations these days.

I've always been able to find a few on ebay, the smaller ones are a bit rarer though - most are the full 42u ones. They usually go for very little due to being collection only. Must admit theres not as many on at the moment as there have been when I've looked previously

Come on... martynbez has been kind enough to post this job on here, theres no need to start jumping to conclusions about internal candidates and all that! In these times I'd bet they've had far more applications than usual and many are probably also capable of doing the job.

We found that the pupils didn't mess around too much and were fairly careful with the parts - we made sure they knew what the bits were worth. Luckily only the pupils that were really interested joined the club. I also only brought enough anti-static bands for 3 groups plus myself so that in theory only one member of the group did each task. They did need alot of one on one tuition so ideally I'd make sure you have atleast two of you there that know what needs to go where & how. Todays session went well, installing the drivers took around 20 mins(the one click intel installer made it a bit too easy though), they then installed subspace continuum and played against each other for the rest of the session.

We've been running a Build you own computer club for the pupils this term, just thought I'd share my experience in case anyone might want to give it a try in their school. The aim for us this time round was to build 3 additional workstations for the school using £1k of our budget which gave the pupils roughly £333 per group which had to include a Vista Business license(monitor, kb, mouse excluded). We gave them a guide detailing what sort of spec we were looking at along with a few rules such as the hdd having to be sata, the case having to be MicroATX etc then let them loose on the ebuyer website for a session or two. Once they had spec'd up their pc we went through and picked out any good finds. We had actually already chosen the parts before hand but getting the pupils to choose components was still a good exercise. One pupil in particular managed to find a better CPU that still fitted into our budget. We also briefly went over why certain parts weren't appropriate along with why it’s better to spend more on certain parts than others. The only component they really chose was the case - we want them to be able to spot their PC in a classroom rather than them all being the same or clones of our other workstations. All 3 workstations had the same internal components, it made building much easier and it'll make things easier for me in the future when deploying them. Between the 2nd and 3rd session I went ahead and ordered the parts(thanks Joe @ CPLTD) and we then started to build the PC's during the 3rd session, the 3rd session onwards went along the lines of: 3: Installing Motherboard, attaching front LED's, Switches and USB/Audio connectors 4: Installing Processor, Memory 5: Installing HDD, DVD Rom, Starting a Vista install 6(this evening): Setting up the drivers, possibly installing a lan game or 2 7 onwards: using the newly built PCs - games etc Along the way I taught them the functions of the various parts and explained best practices(anti static etc) for building PC's. So far they have really enjoyed taking part in the club and some intend to build their own(which may be next term's club). This was all done with pupils from years 6 and 7, Our year 8's were unfortunately unable to take part due to exams etc. Pupils from both years coped very well - we ended up with 3 pupils per PC taking part. One thing that didn’t help was me being the only member of staff with experience of computer building – at times all 3 groups needed attention, the head of IT was also there but he’s not the most technical, hopefully he’ll have learnt enough to be able to help out more when we next run the club. Overall the club has been a great success, we’ll almost defiantly be running it again if budgets allow. James

Looks like a good spec, I'd consider getting a 2nd CPU in there, the hdd space is probably more than you'll need so if money's an issue it may be worth dropping a drive, 438Gb should be ok for a long while yet(or atleast it has been in nearly every primary I've been to)

Woohoo! Fox finally see sense!

I've attached the summary document form supportnet, the full version wouldn't attach for some reason. I can mail it over if you don't have access to supportnet(pm me your email address) Secondary_School_Summary_End_of_Year_Procedures_and_Promotion_to_the_Academic_Year_2009_2010_152.pdf

How much do you usually charge schools? I'd probably go for £30-40 an hour depending on how much they can get good support for from elsewhere. They may be a school but they still need to pay their way.

keep in mind that promethean only offer warrantees with Activ+2 boards that have been installed by qualified installers(I presume thats why your after board only prices) Also the fixed height boards are just ActivBoards, the +2 bit means its the adjustable type. James