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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!

My Win 7 server host machine has rebooted itself this morning. It has two users set up - the main account and an admin account. If I choose the admin account it logs in straight away with no problems. If I choose the main account, I get a black screen with cursor and can't do anything (even Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't work). I get the same thing if I use safe mode - the main account just hangs. Any ideas what might be causing this and is there any way to repair the main account from the admin account? Thank you, Sue

Tried the free app tip and it works - thank you. Only another 18 accounts to set up! Seriously unimpressed with apple 'support'. Have spoken at length to four different departments today, none of whom had a clue about volume licensing, ipads in schools or how to solve my issue with itunes. Top suggestions were wiping all data from the ipads and starting again, and purchasing 20 itunes vouchers so that I could activate the ipads with them (after I had explained that we buy everything through VPP so had no use for credit on the ipads).

The second scenario was what I used to do (all of our ipads are for pupil use). However, I found that every time confiurator tried to push out an ios update, at least three or four of the devices crash and have to be wiped and restored. We have also had issues with it being blocked by our filtering and just hangng in the middle of installs because it couldn't verify codes. I was hoping that Lightspeed would make life easier.

Creating the apple ids wasn't a problem - it's when I try to set the id up on the ipad that i am asked for credit card details. If I cancel, it cancels the whole setup. My ipads currently don't have any icloud/itunes ids on them, and I am finding that Lightspeed doesn't sync new apps to them as a result, so I do need to find a way round it. Just spent another hour on the phone to apple - supposedly the 'education' department, but again the solution was buy 20 itunes vouchers! No one at apple seems to have hear about the volume licensing programme.

My school has a total of 24 apple devices. We hwve recently moved from managing them with Apple Configurator (which led to a full system restore on at least three or four devices every time I tried to add an app) to Lightspeed MDM which now comes included with our Schools Broadband account. All was good until I realised that each device is required to have its own apple id to work with the Lightspeed system. I spent a tedious morning setting up 24 apple ids (somehow managing not to get blocked by apple), but have now got to the point of loading them onto the devices (another tedious job) and hit a problem - apple requires each ID to be activated in itunes, which involves entering credit card information. I spent an hour on the phone to apple support to try to find a way round this, without success - their helpful suggestion was to set up purchase orders so that I could buy an app on each device, even though I explained that we use the volume licensing service for all our apps. I admitted defeat and started activating them using our school credit card, removing it after activation. However, after three successful activations I have now been blocked by apple! Surely there must be a better way to do this - if anyone knows one please let me know as it is driving me mad! How on earth do people manage with hundreds of devices?! Thanks, Sue

My school is running Active Directory on a Windows 2003 server. Our pupils have a group poicy applied that redirects to a shared desktop and start menu programs for each yeargroup. Under our old Win XP system all was fine, but since installing new Win 7 PCs in our suite a year ago we have been having ongoing issues with these settings not being applied consistently on login. It works sometimes and not others - sometimes logging out and bac in with the same credentials fixes it, sometimes it won't work at all. If it doesn't work pupils just get a blank desktop and no programs in their start menu, but no other error message. I am not a networking expert and am at my wit's end trying to fix it. I have deleted profiles from the registry, deleted user profiles from the computer, set up each machine with a fixed IP, but nothing seems to work. Is this a WIn 7 issue? Would upgrading to Win 8.1 fix it? Any suggestions very gratefully received! Thanks, Sue

We didn't use +Pay so I can't comment on that, but from our experience of PMX I would doubt if any of your issues would be solved. I upgraded to PMX because of issues we were having with PM2, but PMX was much worse in my experience. Imports were a nightmare - the report they suppied put data in the wrong columns, and it was not possible to edit or delete records once they had been uploaded Registration didn't work for a lot of our parents, and Parentmail frequently spammed parents with marketing emails, even after we had closed our account. Schoolcomms have their own payment option, which I don't have experience of but may offer you an alternative 'all-in-one' solution. You don't have to worry about csv's as the data is imported directly from SIMS - makes life so much easier! Have never regretted our decision to switch.

We switched to Schoolcomms in the end after a very unhappy experience with PMX and Parentmail (there's another thread on this somewhere if you are interested). We are very happy with our decision - like Parentmail it does email as well as SMS, but is cheaper, easier to use and has better functionality (for our needs anyway). There is an app for Android/Apple phones which allows texts to be sent for free to parents who download it. It links directly to SIMS so data is always up to date, and you remain in control of your data which for us was one of the many advantages over PMX. Been using them for about 6 months and would highly recommend.

Actually it turned out that we were both correct. We have been advised by the DfE that although the UIFSM scheme legally came into force on 1 September, all schools will receive funding for 190 days. This means that in practise Leicestershire pupils were funded from the start of term and parents should not be charged for these meals. My issue with ParentPay was that they were unwilling to help us to set up their system to record the meals as free for FS and KS1 children from the start of term, as advised by the DfE. In the end I had to refund all of the meals individually on the system.

This a query for primary schools in Leicestershire. We have been advised by the Children's Food Trust that the universal infant free school meals scheme started on the first day of term, which for us was 27th August, and not 1st September (spoke to their helpline this morning to double check). However, ParentPay are refusing to accept this and are insisting that all the scheme started on 1st September for all schools, so they won't update their system to handle free meals taken last week. Just wondered if anyone had come across this issue and what you are doing about it. Thanks, Sue