SYNACK

We have a stack of these used as web browsers/content collection (camera/Video/Audio) devices and they work great, not exactly a per user logon type deal but work really well at being single user devices or shared user devices with the provision of non-domain integration.

The only real benefit is power efficiency if you aren't taxing the hardware. This can be worked out via running costs vs how much you save vs a new machine. Depending on your usage pattern and pricing of the second hand gear it usually goes to the second hand gear unless you are talking about an old school p4 space heater.

How about a new form of cage bolt/nut that you can put in from the front that locks into place when tightened, as the bolt goes through the bolt has bits that get pushed out to lock into the rack, kind of like a masonry anchor. If done right it could save all sorts of time and injury.

I still have a bit of legacy hardware in use that I keep a SP0 XP VM just to configure as no modern browser can make sense of the thing - thanks HP - :S Also you are only getting about 40% of the goodness out of a cisco product max if you are using the GUI, it is native command line barely bilingual to GUI.

Yea, a decent tv will ips so will have the decent colour reproduction and hopefully led backlighting for long life and low power usage.

@VeryPC_Colin_M please share, we are looking at similar and hitting an availability road block so more possible models would be handy.

Something IPS, I got a stack of 23" hp pavilion ones like the 27xi or the 20fi when they were on special and they are fantastic.

Perhaps a hybrid setup where there is a local exchange box with no accounts on it, this set up in hybrid mode with 365. Depending on how outlook and exchange behave if outlook is fed the local server on account setup it should authenticate you then hand you off to 365, it may manage to use the existing auth details without a prompt. If it works its a nasty hack but most stuff seems to be with 365.

@nadeem - please add a price as required by this sections rules.

So what you want is really a two pronged thermocouple thermometer probe with a capacitive moisture sensing ability in a thermally hardened device. You chuck it in (maybe three prongs for stability) at the start then it can check and log the core temp and consistency of the cake. Possibly a Bluetooth connection to a phone for settings and output so it can show how long it has been at a certain temp and the consistency via capacitance. If you did multiple sweeps from and two each of the probes you would get a very accurate reading of the moisture and density. Problem is such a device while doable would be expensive for the hardened components and energy harvesting. Especially for something that can be tested for by other much cheaper means. Could still be a nice project though.

We use the ultra short throw mimio projectors with light pens that should easily fit into your budget with room to spare and have decent software to, from teaching and tech prospective. Ours have a decent warrenty that covers laps also along with new lamps being a third the cost of comparable models. Comparitivly lampless ones don't last forever and cost a bomb to replace when they do go.

All of the platforms are a massive pain (there have been several posts raging at all of them lately, ipads, Windows and android. - apart from learnpad which seems to be fine) it depends on what you use and what you want out of it as to which rod you recommend for your own back.

You'll be fine, children are way easier to deal with than teachers, generally politer and more willing to listen and learn. If you can deal with teachers you'll be fine with the kids.

@synaesthesia have you tried kodu with hyperv and remotefx, just wondering if I can pull it off in Multipoint 2012. If it does work like that with vdi diffe'd drives and memory dedupe it should be easy enough to do with a properly speced server or with individual stations with Windows 8 and hyperv.

If it is locked to the user you need a machine GPO for each staff user then apply that either with individual ou per laptop or wmi filtering on the host name per policy applied to the laptops. The administrators group will always be allowed through. We had to do this for our office machines as the teachers kept logging in and breaking them.

Mimio still works like this with the software registered by any hardware, hopefully they keep this up now smart has jumped on the greed wagon.

Intels Nic hardware may be better but their drivers are terrible, half the time the cards aren't even recognize by their own drivers as they get the hardware ids mixed up. Their default setting of not waiting for the link to come up before reporting it is junky too. Tbh i prefer hp broadcom stuff but Intel is a second. I WISH I had been able to send back a batch of Lenovos with junk nic's in them. That is one reason why I steer clear of them as they are built with whatever components are left on the bench that day so their driver lists for a single model are pages long and full of stuff your one may not even have. /rant

Have you considered leaving it blank, backgrounds destroy performance if you happen to be on a slower or less reliable link like remoting in from outside.

I agree, games are an area where more cores are better. Two cores were eaten several years ago and with better Ai and design principles going in you will want more, even the xb1 with eight cores offloads a bunch of threads in forza and titanfall to azure. PC games usually try to onboard more of the load so more cores the better. The turbo boost is also handy for some things that hit a single thread hard. I would probably go for a top or near top of the line i5 if concerned with cost - that's what I got for my dev box - or an i7 if you are wanting to hit the gaming hard.

Intels new chips have transcoding extensions built in http://www.whitneyland.com/2010/09/intel-cpu-vs-nvidia-gpu-video-transcoding.html but so do the other newer gpus.

Rather valid given our professions.

Oops, it appears I have made a mess again, count this as me signing out of the debate, my views have not changed and I think needed to be expressed publicly to Apple but it may have gone a bit off track along the way into an Apple vs the world debate. Hopefully this thread will die down a little without me blowing on the fire. I really should know better. My bad.

Good, I was thinking I may not have been putting my point across strongly enough

That I had actually come across before but the point is rather that Apple is the only lot that is truly stuffed up by it, the others manage fine. Windows had the event log, a nice organized place to keep information as opposed to the throw it anywhere mentality of the Linux/BSD/Unix/whatever base of OSX. It is just cleaner and more civilized. As to Windows melting down I have simply never come across meltdowns that opaque on a PC, something somewhere will generally tell you what's up and a single main line update is seriously unlikely to hose the whole system. Additionally if you look it up online there are hundreds of places you can usually find the answer, with a Mac you might find some outdated documentation on Apples site and possibly some yet to be redacted solution in their forums as they wipe most of the solutions that make them look bad. With a Mac you are fighting on two fronts, against the fault and Apple who want to cover up all mentions of any faults ever on their platform. You can always ring their ever polite but mostly pointless helpdesk for some platitudes to tide you over till you buy a new 'working' mac or give up, wipe the lot, reinstall and hope the same thing does not happen another month down the line.

Not me but I am prone to expressing my opinion and view political correctness as a truly bad thing contributing to the decline of western 'civilisation'. Agreed, but it is Apple, I'm sure they invented it only ten years after everyone else started using it. For reference our domain is not .local either, the hardware seems to be fine and the mac mini still runs like a 486. 10.whatever.3 hosed it completely and as its a server I am not keen on rebuilding the whole thing just because Apple finally got around to releasing a hotfix. It is still slow as anything under a different user and my old Pentium M (installed to Windows 7) tablet outperforms it for web browsing. @seawolf As to the strong EM field, maybe I do, the macs in the library seem to be alright but this mac mini and these ipads are just junk. Apple is zero help and their devices couldn't provide enough useful feedback to track down anything. Just because it does not generate an error doent mean that its working, just that it is not bothing to tell you anything useful as that might confuse someone somewhere. Also no error means they can just blame everything else with no real proof. As someone else said, possibly on a different thread, their experience turned to hell when they put ios 7.11 on as it suddenly needed to phone home to apple to connect to wireless, no internet, no wireless. The response from someone to this was that obviously everyone else was doing it wrong and they should just let Apple access whatever it wanted. This non-standard behaviour broke stuff for no good reason and then the blame is shifted to the victims by the bully. A windows machine may try a DNS lookup to see if it can get net but won't disable the connection if it can't. This is yet more pointless idiocy just to make things harder despite their just works façade. If they could just stop being toolbags for a few seconds each year it would be lovely.