PotNoodleTech

I bet ESS and Arbour legal teams are looking very closely at how that contract was dealt with and awarded. Better be squeaky clean!!

I always run SIMS client on the server after every update just to check it's all updated. That way you'll see straight away if somethings gone wrong and SIMS won't load. If SIMS loads, and you can log into it, WONDE should be fine! I've repeatedly asked WONDE about showing us some kind of dashboard so we can see that things are actually connected and transferring (rather than wait until stuff stops working) but they're useless and won't seem to entertain the idea.

Generally as with most warranties, it isn't worth it as the yearly cost you spend over 5 years would simply fund an entirely new device. Yes it could fail tomorrow and you'll get your moneys worth. Yes it might not ever fail and you've just thrown your money away.

Nice you won't regret it Eaton are superior to APC especially when it comes to battery management and replacement - they seem to last forever. My pair of Eaton 5000 are over 5 years old on original batteries and still getting 1 hour 10 mins runtime.

"Yes, I can confirm that we discovered the incident on the XX January and this was reported to the ICO on Wednesday the XX January at 10am in accordance with the ICO guidelines." This is how real companies deal with data issues properly, they don't bury their heads in the sand and pretend nothing happened like Classcharts/TES.

If you are taking the rating of the power supply e.g. 2 x 1000w power supplies that doesnt mean the server can or will use 2000 watts it just means that is what the maximum of the power supplies are rated to. Generally a normal server will use 200watts ish and maybe a big dual cpu with 30 hard drives will use 500-700 watts max. If you use the max power supply rating you will be buying a UPS about 10x the size you need and wasting loads of money. Best way is to actually measure each server one at a time - run something like cinebench on them to use 100% cpu and measure the watts - then tot all that up for all servers and that should give you a good idea of the max power you'll use.

It won't benefit all if it's on separate "high uptime" infrastructure!

To be honest though usually a hall actually is one of the public facing areas of the school probably and gets seen in shows/parents evenings/events/twitter/facebook etc There's nothing sadder than a posh school with a 37" projector from the 90s! Worth £5000 every 10 years surely and as a side benefit you get modern fit for purpose teaching and learning facilities in your hall for your staff and students! Bonus!

I can't see small TVs being any use to be honest - even the 86" we have in classrooms don't look that big in a classroom and would be dwarfed in our hall. You should be able to get a 12ft wide image from something like an Epson laser projector for under £5000 fitted we just did our sports hall for under £4000 but saved money by actually painting the white screen on the wall rather than using expensive pull down screens etc.

You know what a lick of paint and splash of colour makes a massive difference - I think I need to give our office a little refurb in the summer hols. The neon sign is fab too.

Yep still struggling to use it in the mornings here too. I guess whatever performance improvements caused the data loss have been rolled back.

Never trust an IT office with an empty desk (ideally you shouldn't even see swathes of desk/floor space for months on end).

I think the key thing with Chrome O/S is that if you are already using google services in your org, then Chromebooks are an absolute no brainer as you just turn them on, log in and hey presto there's all your orgs workflow right in front of you. It also suits agile environments more as you can do everything you need no matter where you are in the world with just once device. Orgs that are still heavy on windows or office365 etc will not see as much value in chromebooks as we do. One things for sure, I'd rather buy and set up 1000 chromebooks than 50 surface tabs and I'd never go back to having trolleys of Windows laptops.

Generally you don't want to charge and discharge a lithium battery to 100% or 0% so often the battery management will have a built in limiter at the top and bottom so that you effectively only ever discharge to 10% and only ever charge to 90% of the batteries theoretical maximum. So 41 from a 50 sounds about right and down to 30 after a few years sounds about right too!

Hmm rebuilding a stack from scratch is not really a technical support response I would expect. That's absolute last ditch, not the first step surely?? That's like saying I am having a strange problem in MS Word? Ok your gonna have to format the C drive and reinstall the whole PC?? Seems like lazy support to me.

ESS are getting desperate now - you'll find the new 3 year cloud contracts they are forcibly locking schools and LAs into will include in the billion pages of T&Cs anti competitive data removal terms as discussed in this thread. The best option is to move right now to Arbor or the like before you get tied in for another 3 years and screwed over. Sadly my LA is falling for ESS's plan hook line and sinker - all 100+ schools signing a new ESS contract in April..... Sadly my school has just been locked into the new contract.

That's the dedicated Vmware style Hyper V only Host O/S version that's being depreciated (the one which literally no one uses). I expect the OP is just using standard Windows 2019 server with the Hyper V role installed which is fine to continue using till the end of 2019 extended support (Jan 9 2029)

My main aims are. Honesty and integrity - no BS and do what they say. Not pushy - if you ring/email me every day you will be blocked. Willing to go above and beyond. Suppliers that can go above and beyond to really help the school/pupils/me get added to my permanent "will always deal with" list. Preferably with an easy to use website so I don't have to waste time emailing back and for if I just want a pack of AA batteries. Not many suppliers make the mark! I've only got about 5 on my "will always deal with" list.

Meh only just got on 2022. 2025 can take a running jump for a few years!

Yeh I've gotta admit I am more than happy with Ricoh copiers are great and framework pricing etc is good. It almost sounds like RobFuler's got an over-zealous account manager who wants to meet some extra targets. My account manager down in Cardiff would never entertain talking to a school and not using a framework.

Hi Chris - it's by far not the best install I've seen but it doesnt "look" too unsafe as you can see the Unistrut is bolted to the red steel girders so it's not likely to fall off. Hopefully the Unistrut is bolted to the red steel behind where the camera man was too rather than just sitting on the ceiling tile.... If you want to be sure - you could always do the "hang test" and if it falls on your head it's not safe My main concern is the what looked like MDF projector mount that the projector is bolted to? Can you confirm the actual bracket it should be at least 1mm thick steel. As you say - it's a remnant from a decade+ ago - if you can replace it then do so. It looks like it was fitted in that manner so as to avoid possible asbestos issues.

Ah lol I didnt see this - under no circumstances go direct. I extended my contract with Ricoh after year 3 for the last 2 years as we were happy with the copiers but that was all under the same T&C as the old framework contract, same click costs no scanning costs, etc.

Ok - that's not good it does sound like as others have said you are not on a framework. If your not on a framework you're getting ripped off! Charging for scan clicks - literally I've never heard of it! I would suggest checking what type of agreement you are in and if it is not one of the education approved frameworks which Ricoh are on - then get off that contract and start a new one, possibly do 3 quotes etc too just to show Ricoh your serious.

So - is access to local LAN services ok - no slowness or dropped packets on network servers file shares etc etc? I.e can you isolate that it is infact external internet issues rather than an internal network loop as others have suggested above. A network loop won't just take out the internet services, it will make everything go wonky from shares to log in and out to printing etc

I think if I recall I installed it manually on each PC as we only needed it on 20 pcs and it was quicker than fiddling with the above.