sjb

I have two mobile classrooms currently without working LAN connections. They are connected by a fibre optic cable to the main building. I have had the fibre connection checked and new media converters fitted on both ends. The network sockets have also been checked and are working. Computers in both classrooms are reporting 'unidentified network' and 'no valid ip configuration available' for the LAN connection. Both can connect to the server via Wifi. All other computers (same make and model) can connect to the network without any issues, and we have spare IP addresses available. I have reinstalled drivers, reinstalled Windows, checked cables, had two external contractors in to look at it, and spoken to the technical support helpline of the computer manufacturer. I have run out of ideas! If anyone has any suggestions I would be very grateful. Thanks Sue

Only by cloning the hard drive from another classroom computer. Couldn't get anything else to work I'm afraid.

My school uses a networked Konica photocopier for all of our printing and copying. We are looking at options to get a new machine, as the current one is starting to fail, and have come across a company called Photocopiers Direct (also known as free photocopiers for schools) who are offering what looks like a good deal. They don't charge a rental fee, but charge slightly more per copy which works our around £150 per quarter cheaper for us on our last quarter's figures compared to leasing direct from Konica. We have checked the small print and it all looks OK. I just wondered if anyone has had any experience of this company? Thanks Sue

They were all upgraded from Windows 7, so this might be something to look at. Some of the failed SSDs were in units that were overheating to the point that they were too hot to touch. I will try clean installs to see if it helps.

Kingston Hyper X

Sorry - should have said that the 7 failed ICT suite machines are all SSDs. Office was a hard drive.

I installed Windows 10 on 31 computers in our ICT suite in the summer holidays, all 2 years old and working well. Since then 7 hard drives have failed. I also recently installed Windows 10 on on of our office machines a few weeks ago, 12 months old and never had any problems, and the hard drive on that has now failed too. Thankfully they are still all under warranty, but I am concerned that it may be more than bad luck as I have never had this problem with any of our PCs running Windows 7. Also if you Google Window 10 and hard drive failure a lot of similar stories pop up. I'm don't understand how software can cause hardware failure on this scale, but I'd be interested to find out if any other schools have had similar issues. We can't afford to keep replacing hard drives at this rate once the warranties expire!

Sorry for the late response. I eventually got this response from Lego support: The Activity icon being greyed-out has also been known to be related to Flash Player so did you have any luck with the patch for Windows which can be obtained from the following site: http://education.lego.com/en-gb/searchresult?q=wedo Didn't fix our issue, which seems to be related to the pupils having their documents folder redirected from the default location, but may work for someone else. Upgrading to Windows 10 seems to have made ours work, ironically, but wouldn't recommend this solution as it creates a host of other issues!

I haven't managed to resolve this yet. I did eventually get a response from Lego technical support, which is below, but hasn't worked for me! The Activity icon being greyed-out has also been known to be related to Flash Player - a patch for Windows can be obtained from the following site: http://education.lego.com/en-gb/searchresult?q=wedo

Thank you - I will have a look into this.

We have recently installed new classroom computers running Windows 10 and all but one of them have Smart Notebook 11.4 installed and working without any problems. The other machine will run the installer and gets to 'Publishing program information' then starts rolling back and uninstalls itself and displays an error message saying 'error 1603'. I have tried using the Smart uninstaller to remove all traces of previous installations and cleaned all left-over Smart keys from the registry using regedit, but still the same thing happens. I am logged on with the administrator account and am able to install other software on the machine so there shouldn't be an issue with permissions. Any advice on how to fix this would be very gratefully received. Thanks Sue

I have just installed all-in-one PCs in 15 classrooms. Because the PCs don't have a VGA output, I have had to connect them to projectors via USB. However, Smart Notebook now thinks that the computer is connected to a third party interactive screen and puts a licensing message across the screen, making the text below unreadable. We are using Smart boards in all classrooms so the software is legal. We are still using version 11 as we don't want to pay an annual license fee, so Smart support won't help as they say this version is obsolete. Anyone know how I can get rid of the error message please? Thank you.

They are DCs - one runs active directory and curriculum files, the other hosts SIMS and our admin files. We have been using Virtualbox for over a year and never had an issue before.

We use Virtualbox to run our admin and curriculum servers on a Windows 7 machine. The host machine has 16gb RAM and is powerful enough to do the job. Everything was working fine until I had a bit of a disaster a few weeks ago and accidentally deleted the directory containing the virtual machines (stupid, I know!). Window recovered the curriculum server from an automatic backup but overwrote the admin server with a new backup whilst it was in the process of being recovered. I set up a new virtual machine, reinstalled server and reovered the admin files from a remote backup. However, ever since this was completed the virtual machines randomly abort on a fairly regular basis (once or twice a day, either one or both machines). We didn't have this problem before, so I am wondering if it is something to do with the setup of Virtualbox - perhaps the allocation of RAM between the server host and the two virtual machines (both running Server2012). Could anyone advise me what the optimum allocation would be please? Or is there anything else obvious that might be causing the machines to abort? Thanks Sue

Ended up logging in as the admin user, running a few maintenance checks then rebooting and it loaded straight away!