PotNoodleTech

Just avoid acer completely. What was the 300e issues? I've still got 350 out in the field. Only real issue with those is you can't get replacement touch screens for reasonable money. Have standardised on 100e now for that reason.

They will be powered from somewhere - I would look at the power first make sure a trip switch hasnt tripped or something like that?

Same happened to all of our Acer chromebooks. 90% faliure rate by year 4. Deffo an manufacturing defect. Lesson learned for me, I'll never buy an Acer, or 100 Acers, or 1000 Acers ever again. Dell hinges have eventually gone on really old 11" models. More wear and tear than manufacturing defect. To be honest lenovo are the only ones that seem to not have hinge issues.

One way around it would be to get a 32 for yourself and then turn the 24" 90 degrees and use it as a portrait screen on the left or right for word/web browsing etc. That generally works well and doesnt look to bad. Or even better get work to get you anther 24" and then buy a 32 inch too and have one on the left and one on the right - very productive

Yeh the covid days are over so you'll just have to do what everyone else in the world does now and pay for contract SIM cards. (Preferably unlimited data as it doesnt take much youtube to go through 10 or 20 gig.) You should be able to reuse the actual MIFI dongles as they usually have the passwords etc stamped on the inside of the battery flap - unless they SIM locked them - you'll have to test it out.

I cant argue with that I mean if your still on Vmware then literally any thing else you do will be significantly cheaper. Ive been running on hyperv for the last 10 years I cant remember the figures but literally a grand or 2 for datacentre licences and used/refurb servers. Operating costs = peanuts. You dont have to spend 50 grand a year on servers unless your a university or massive MAT. I went hyperV a long time ago as Vmware got rid of the educational licenceing back in the day and costs quadrupled overnight as I saw the writing was on the wall for VMware back then. The recent price increases are completely absurd. I would look into cloud only if I was doing a refresh over the next couple of years.

The last gasps of a dying company.

Thanks thats a great job site!

I wholeheartedly aggree with supportman. When people are talking about availability, the metric that no one ever seems to use is "what percentage improvement are you going to get in uptime by going with this new and expensive system" For example If a Poweredge 740XD with Dual PSU dual NIC 24 x SSD's spread over 2 arrays/diskgroups achieves 99.0% uptime over the past 5 years - then whatever you are upgrading to is only actually going to be able to deliver up to 0.99% increased uptime. You have to ask yourself is the £thousands you are spending worth the possibility of an maximum uptime improvement of less than a percentile. (and thats not even going into the argument of the more complicated you make something with NAS/SAN/CLUSTER/FIBRE CHANNEL/ETC the slower and less reliabile the system as a whole becomes so you might actually end up reducing your uptime below the 99% you had before) Clearly the answer is no it not worth it - which is why I think any school can run on the above 1 server "model" and achieve 99% uptime whilst mitigating catastrophic faliure using Virtualisations, replicas and modern backup (including cloud storage).

Sorry you should be running SSDS on any graphics/video/audio workstations now as HDD are so totally completely and utterly outclassed by modern NVME drives. Maybe get a 2tB NVME/SSD in there for editing workloads and use the SATA drive as longer term storage not for editing.

What laser is it there are different motherboards in every laser?

Looks like a software (as in DNA) bug to me.

I think it's up to the school to evaluate their requirements and decide if they are posibly going to over spend to meet the requirements. The one size fits all approach never works - or at least if it does work (everyones at 40 gig) then there is too much wasted taxpayers money in the project. But this minimum spec is quite high and really you could argue is overkill in many areas for primary and smaller secondaries (40 gig trunks, 10 gig building links when the building only has 2 clasrooms, etc). Sadly theres no easy way to do this the risk for them is they leave it to each school and then each school heavily penny pinches, does not get what is neccasary which is historically what has happened over the last 20 years. I would advise you try and meet all the requirements but be balanced, theres no point in overspending so hard on infratructure so that you can not afford any new PCs or chromebooks to actually run on your infrastructure. Arguabley the end user devices are the most important as no matter how fast your switches are - without an end user decvices - there is no ICT.

So are refunds illegal nowadays too?

I'd be willing to wager not much longer. I recon you've got a year, max, before your forced into it.

I think you've got to ask yourself is this a misue of the schools power to put key logging software on pupil owned devices is a step too far in my moral compass.

If your live domain is virtualised why not restore a copy to a seperate server use a seperate switch build a couple of PCs and run it totally offline - that way you cna test whatever you want for real first.

You don't have to spend 50 grand on servers, most schools could get away with a second hand Poweredge 740XT and 24 SSD's and Veeam to a Synology NAS. Chances of data loss are low chances of total data recovery are high, and can be had for under circa £5000. In my experience of servers the more complicated you make it with sans nasses clusters extra fibre switches etc etc the less reliable overall it becomes (and often slower, too).

Sounds like they're just making excuses - find a better company - those big industrial shredders can shred literally anything - chuck a sledge hammer in there and bye bye sledge hammer.

I loved my Nokia 7110. Such a cool phone.

No it's crazy money if it was one or two thousand a year we could put a case forward but 16k I'd rather buy 8 x 86" smarboards lol

Lol our LA are running the MIS gig here - theyre so slow and change adverse that I recon they (and thus we) will be the band playing right till the cold wet end.

Good thread I think this is a good idea.

School catering systems are like building management systems, they're literally all garbage based of early 2000's programming. Youd be better off going with modern suite that proper businesses and shops use.

Got Office 2021 on Win 11 image so as I am migrating rooms over then the office problem will be solved too.