bossman

@witch: It seems that the NVidia you have is the cause of all your misfortune and therefore I would state as long as you get a graphics card that is fully windows 7 compliant then you should have no problem. I would take that card back to the shop you bought it from and exchange it rather than pay out of your own pocket and to justify the teacher paying for it I would state to them that it was the graphics card from the start which caused the problems. I do hope you are charging for this?

@witch: What is the version number of the drivers from the Nvidia website? Are they the same as these or newer? NVIDIA DRIVERS 270.61 WHQL I would also look into the graphics mode as this seems to be set at 1Hz as default in some cases and should be around 60 - 90Hz, you should be able to alter this in Safemode. Good luck

@soulfish: This may be of interest to you : Purchase Asset Management Software. Doesn't have the network scanning tool but does have barcode scanning built in and this is what i am using this year along with asset tags which will make the whole process a little less daunting. Bought my barcode scanner off amazon for £30.00 and it will be used this summer when I do a full IT audit.

Seconded here

Laptops equals craptops after 6 months at least 20% will have battery problems after 12 months around 40% will have keys missing and other parts broken after 2 years their not worth the investment as you have to replenish again, good money after bad is what I say. A good desktop will always outlive a good laptop and they are easier to sustain don't have the connectivity problems and furthermore upgradeable to boot, thin clients will give you browserbility and office based but that is all unless you are prepared to spend vast amounts of money. Laptops have their uses at home on yer lap, and if you don't have the infrastructure in school to support wired desktops or the space then that is what you have to live with. It would be fun if the European commission came out with new legislation which banned the use of wireless hardware in school including mobile phones (Due to the child element), hell where would most of the BSF schools be then? I would hate to hazard a guess Anyway I digress, as mentioned above in other less tantric posts unless you are going to invest heavily in a financial way then you will have to just get your laptops through a scheme which covers them being replace when they get damaged by the wee little darlings, cost you an arm and a leg though

@Heebeejeebee: What about a new system for both merged into one with free data migration: ScholarPack - A comprehensive, flexible and web based management information system (MIS) for schools Just a thought and possibly a lot cheaper too. We thinking about the move if we gets the go ahead

@Janyo: We have found that toshiba are very reliable and build well onto the CC4 network with no failures at all As long as they are capable of running Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate and they have the required nic drivers embedded in the build process then Bob's your Uncle and Fannies your Aunt Over the past 9 years we have never used RM hardware just the RMMC software and it just works

@gselliot: LAs will no doubt try to make out that they supply quite a considerable amount of services and something else they spout is the words "COCO compliance" this has something to with security on the LAs WAN to which they have been certified as meeting the criteria. Quite a lot of schools today have moved from the LAs to their own personal ISP and have not suffered in the least on fixed pricing. It is always the problem with LAs who seem to justify a price hike to maintain their support costs when in fact they should streamline to accommodate the large amount of secondary schools they have a hold on. In this world of commerce why should schools be held to ransom over their internet connection, they like everyone in the country or the world for that matter should be able to change their ISP as and when without incurring the large costs which ISPs always subject schools to. BT are offering some great deals at the moment with no installation costs on 3 and 5 year contracts subject to a survey.

+1 for Smoothwall UTM1000

I have heard of similar events happening down the coal mines when they used to use re-enforced airbags filled with compressed air to temporarily hold up certain parts of the pit walls, miners used to take short-cuts across these by straddling them and have unfortunately in very rare events burst, blowing the unfortunate miners innards around in their bodies to an extent that they have died from their injuries.

Our school policy which is backed by the HT is that only the school e-mail is used by the staff and students for school and that is the only e-mail service they can access in school. It is up to the individual if they want to use their school account as their private account also.

@mattx: Smooth riding like your style although you could have cut some of the fancy stuff out and made it home quicker, me thinks you were just showing off hehe!!

What separates the 2 networks? Is it a switch (VLan) or a router? Could it be the way the admin accesses the network through this switch or router which is different to the curriculum network? Different protocols setup on the switch ports, packet sizes, frames etc? How does the curriculum network access the Sims server what authentication does it use? How is the Sims server configured for the admin network what is the difference between the clients? Er! its still a little early and my brain is not warmed up yet will think of some other stuff

@kennysarmy: We looking at getting funding from various eco projects via our funding officer. If all goes well it will help offset some of our carbon usage on our ICT. We have already shaved around 10k per annum off our energy usage costs with various other projects around the school.

Have you looked at your AV? Could this be a reason why clients are timing out as the files on the server and also the client are being inspected by your AV each time they are accessed. Just a thought as you seem to have covered most other things. ;D

So does Moodle if you integrate Open source e-portfolio and social networking software - Mahara ePortfolio System works very well with moodle

My daughters school bought Frog and she is quite IT literate yet hated the very essence of it. No VLE is going to be teacher friendly as most teachers want the content to be already in place as they don't want to have to learn anything and so any VLE you put in place will be money wasted. Your teachers need to be taught and guided by another teacher who is willing to push all the departments with the backing of the SLT and HT. Only teachers can produce the materials they need to use for lessons and so it should only be them that produce the content as trying to produce content by other means is bound to fail as it will not suit their individual needs. Most people in a job have to constantly upgrade their skills except for teachers who seem to think it is their right to demand something that costs a fortune and then decide not to use it because they cannot be a***d to learn new skills. Teachers are like every other person and must learn and adapt new skills or else they are not teaching to their full potential as the government has anounced today on the BBC, schools will be able to get rid of under performing teachers a lot easier than they used to.

+1 with what @dhicks recommends it works well and version 2 is so much better

@kennysarmy: How to setup an FTP server in Windows using IIS Is this any help?

@littleMiss: Have around 10 x 2950 24 port Cisco switches which you could have plus a few P4 2.66Ghz machines plus some projectors and brackets which are in need of a deep clean but do work. Are you going to the EG conference as I could bring them to the conference and you could pick them up from there.

@trunks: I would be very careful when purchasing batteries other than from the intended source (RM or the actual manufacturer) especially when its children who are using them as there has been quite a few accounts of these batteries exploding into flames. Only the other day I had been told (and shown photos) by one of our staff members that a family member had bought a laptop battery from ebay where the source had been China and he was lucky that the house had not burnt down or he himself had not been seriously injured. This is not meant to scare people but to make them aware of the dangers of not purchasing genuine parts when it comes to batteries as I would hate for a child or member of staff to be seriously injured from something that I had purchased on the cheap. Better to be safe than sorry This is just my advice but backed up by countless incidents involving batteries for all types of equipment.

This is a job for............................................ Tv Theme Steptoe & Son (Old Ned)&#x202c‏[/url] hehe!

I may be wrong here but didn't the last outsourced managed service deployed in Birmingham fail miserably? If so then why are those people at the LA who are in charge of decision making still in their jobs? It seems to me that these are the people who are costing the country and LA's money with pie in the sky dreams of trying to save money when long term it costs them 10 times more. Outsourcing always seems to come into play with large companies as they seem to think that it will save them money, last large company was British Gas who outsourced their IT and Call centres to the dismay of their customers who closed their accounts and went elsewhere, so intense was this that within 6 months of outsourcing they had lost 60% of their income. There are many other companies who have gone down this route and paid the consequences so why do LA's when they don't have the expertise lean towards this strategy? Beats me! Good luck all those in Birmingham again

@pete: Got it sorted Pete thanks to this: Openfiler — Forums right down at the bottom. Using Chrome at the moment (fallen out with firefox) Anyway this is the result: Cheers anyway Pete have a good one

Hi All, Happy Friday to you Question? Have found out that latest version has a dodgy ISO image (after multiple tries from different mirrors) anyway have installed the version before this which is 2.3 and this has worked a treat on the installation. Problem is it will not allow me to create a raid array through the GUI it just keeps coming back with warning in the top part of the interface saying no array has been defined. Has anyone seen this before and if so how did they get around this? Have a good weekend all of you and listen up out there! "Do it to them before they do it to you" quote the sergeant in Hillstreet Blues