PotNoodleTech

OK thanks I will look into that but having. Other ways round it I've found is to buy a startech HDMI splitter and power it from a Displayport to HDMI dongle which does seem to work - I've got a few more of those on order. Hving to spend £25 or £50 or £75 per PC just to get the PC to work as it should is not sitting well with me. I want to try and identify/solve the actual problem before it affects more schools as these lenovo M70s were sold across wales as one of the three different pcs you could buy on the welsh catalogue so they've litreally sold tens of thousands of them here.

Yes!! This!!!! I had one that payed up for 2 weeks I left it off with everything unplugged for a couple of days as the teacher wasnt in there when I plugged it back in and plugged all three outputs in it works and touch wood it's still working 1 week on - i dont expect it to last though. Contrast that to one in another room that HDMI failed and now one of the Displayports has failed too so that PC can only output onto one monitor!! :-/

Wow I've never heared of those pouches before - they look pretty draconian!

What optical cables are you using mate out of interest? It's a seperate issue I think as the ports dying thing actually happens with whatever is plugged in e.g. a TFT monitor doest work either, wheras if I plug a different PC or chroembook into the HDMI lead to the boards they come on straight away and works fine so I don't believe it's a cabling issue.

Thanks for the "input" (chuckle) Yes we've noted the 4K - it always defaults to 4k30 on our boards, but we set each screen to 1080p60. HDMI cables are decent quaity 4k 60 18GB/s rated and no more than 10 metres. Therere is no pattern there - infact most of the port issues are in classrooms where the screen is within 5m of the PC. :-/ Cheers!

Hi All we are battling against a problem/bug here on our own and I can't find any other school in my area that is having the same issue. Looking for some backup on edugeek! We are having issues on Lenovo M70s Staff PCs where we are using all three display outputs (2 x displayports into 24" TFT and 1 HDMI into an 86" whiteboard varying manufacturers). This started off working OK - we've done similar things for a long time with our old Dell Optiplex's. We are seing the ports slowly die on the PCs - we have 7 classrooms with this issue now. The HDMI port appears to die first after some time of being unreliable and finicky, but we have just had one room where we plugged the whiteboard into the Displayport via a converter a few of weeks ago as a mitigation/bodge fix, and now the displayport has died too - to so that PC only has one working output!! Anyone seen anything like this? Tried firmware driver updates etc but nothing seems to work. I suspect an actual manufacturing defect / hardware issue on the motherboard. Clearly going to be having trouble with the RMA process as it's such a weird and wonderful issue that no one else in the world seems to have run into. :-/ Cheers!!

Also if you remove it within the image doesnt it all get reinstalled during feature updates? Or does that happen anyway?

No need, I can see your in a federation so software upgrades and replacements are probably already unneccasarily complicated. :-/

How about: this extra 900 quid is money well spent out of our 4 million anual budget as Inventry is unreliabile with terrible support and is only going to get worse, cause more problems and cost us more and more money in the long term in both own own staff time troubleshooting, and external costs in possible fees/contracts/engineer visits? If your BM isnt able to balance initial cost with value for money with long term costs with reliability and pick the right outcome then maybe they shouldnt be your BM.

Server 2019 ADK 10.1.19041.1 WDS 10.1.19041.1 MDT 6.38456.1000 All good here.

So if one of the two power supplies in each server is plugged straight into the wall then the server is not protected from blackouts brownouts undervoltage and overvoltage/spikes lightning strikes or anything else nasty from the mains. It could simply be lack of power conditioning and you have been unlucky?

It's generally the same issues as with the NHS and other organisations, top heavy organisation, excessive middle management and incessant wastage across the organisations (getting rid of 3 year old PCs that are flying machines for no other reason than "they're 3 years old so they gotta go" or refurbing a room for the 3rd time in 5 years and junking all the furnature into the skip yet again. Dont get me wrong I'll take those PCs for schools and I have taken the lovely super-expensive furnature for schools in the past but the fact is that level of constant change and wastage can not be sustainable. All of this, whilst saddling young adults with a lifetime of debt. It's not right.

I assume you are asking "how fast is your hosted MIS?" If so I can only comment on SIMS but SIMS connected is slower in all areas compared to hosting it yourself on good server infrastructure. In particular the noticable slowness is logging in, and the constant mouse lag, and the inability to right click. Clearly this is due to be being a) sims b) a legacy non cloud platform shoved into the cloud. I am sure a modern web based MIS like bromcom or arbor would be mucg better in terms of response and speed.

Look at synology too a lot of schools are using that in the LA next door - redundancy on the backup storage with multiple units at each school and office and google backup, and works with Veeam for your VM backups.

Maybe that's a good thing lol. Gaming session over now get outside and climb a tree!

I dont trust classcharts with a bargepole since they lied about their data breech. The lower my expectations the less chance of dissapointment!

Yes it's down this morning across our schools too. A variety of timeout errors. Emailed support for all the good it will do. Theymust surely know theire entire system is down across the entire country? :S

This exactly - It's not about features it is about ease of use and google is so easy to use a 5 year old could do it (and they do, in primary schools!) wheras the microsoft offerings are so poorly laid out with nonsensical methods of doing things or starting things that even I, the supposed guru, literally don't really know if a teams meeting is going to go smootly until the second the meeting starts. Having seen teams and sharepoint etc be used at a supposedly professional level in the LA - it's a total mess. Teams in particular is the worst bit of software on MS365.

Have a look here too - theres a few good settings. https://promevo.com/knowledge/admin-console-best-practices-edu

Agreed. Last thing you want in winter is to be blowing freezing cold air from the atic back into your living area.

Just bare in mind a heated version using up to 400w running 24/7 is going to send your leccy bill up 2 - 3 quid a day

If they are using a hypervisor with VMs that is the opmtimal soloution so just sounds like the server is not beefy enough to cope with the number of clients? Should be able to be solved by fitting a better server more cores/ram/ssds? I am assuming this is a hypervisor on your existing main school VM host - it could be better as people has said above to totally seperate the system onto a new server.

Fibre via catenary wire is the way forward in the long term. Not sure about the bridge mode burt they do do some kind of "mesh mode" where the wifi points can mesh/daisy chain off eachother so that may work for you. Wouldnt be expecting the signal between 15 metres and 2 outside walls to be amazing though.

Aproach your new MIS provider see if theres anythiung they can do to help smooth the transition. Two systems we use on the daily that are ultra bad value for tax payers money. 1. Building Management Systems 2. Catering systems. Ive never seen a "good one" of either, they're all garbage, and they both work out monumentally expensive. Theres such a massive gap in the marker there for a good version of either.

If you've got 1:1 chromebooks and already use google heavily then google is all you need. Weve had both since 2014 but nowadays we could easily drop office365 completeley and do everything in google.