dgsmith

Wow.. even worse spec than we have! We got P4 3.2ghz HT, 1GB DDR2 and 200GB IDE and they're really struggling! I have been reluctant to allow any local drive access as inevitably it'll be the "only area where X files are stored and not backed up", and it'll just happen that we'll need, or choose to reimage the machine not realising, or not having any choice. With regards to M-Audio devices.. M-AUDIO - Fast Track - Record Guitar and Vocals on Your Computer They work reasonably well.. just a single USB connection gives you a midi port, connection for guitar and headphones and some adjustments on top (don't know the techie desc but I know as a unit it works well). We use Roland UM-1G adapters to connect Roland keyboards to the computer via USB again. In fact, I don't really think we utilise the sound cards to be honest. I guess in our case we'd either buy a load of M-Audio or Asus Xonar cards or perhaps enough to cover half then manage with on board.

This is a very interesting thread for me as we are in an exact position as you.. old P4 machines, showing signs of age, keyboards through midi etc and the new spec you're looking at (i3 2100, 4GB DDR3, 250GB HDD) is the exact one I am hoping we could upgrade to! Unfortunately for us, I think we have much more of a battle to get this progressed here. Out of interest, how old are the P4 machines you have running now and what spec are these currently? More importantly, what are your main reasons and justification for needing them upgrading? We have creative sound cards on PCI, but alot of sandy bridge motherboards don't support conventional PCI now, or have it in a position which makes it impossible for us to utilise the slot, so we are also looking at the Asus Xonar pci-express based cards (low profile) which seem very decent and not a bad price either. On the other hand, we may not need the sound cards if the latency on board is bearable (on board on a sandy bridge will no doubt be miles better than our onboard currently on 6yr old equipment). We have a handful of M-Audio USB fast track devices which act as a sound card in the sense that it's a single USB cable from the device to the machine and you can run all sound through the unit. Latency on a "test" i3 machine we have is about 8ms compared with 40-50 on the older P4 machines (it would seem the hardware spec of the machine plays a massive part even when using the same M-Audio device).

We bought about 100 of them a few months back from Luke @ Millgate.. I think they were 0.3m and his price was very good! I would deffo give him a shout.

There is always the exact same one, but the next model up (next CPU up) for £490 + VAT with insight here Perhaps Misco are just ripping anyone off that buys it!

Well I have spent painstaking hours on our MRBS installation to make it look nothing like MRBS and have posted here and there what I have done with it.. sometimes I even get lost in my own customisations! I get the feeling you want to create a landing page that works through all your rooms showing bookings for every day for the current week? By current week, do you mean from Mon-Fri or current day-7 days time? I can't help but feel that it would be incredibly "noisy" if you wanted to show 5 days of bookings for every room you have.. on a single page! It may work if you have just a handful, but even then it would have to have to scroll a fair bit down the page. I opted for what I preferred to be an instant 2-week viewable table on a per-room basis (as seen in an older screenshot here), with the primary view showing all rooms in a particular area on the current day, though that could easily be for all rooms - i've since amended it to start the table at the current day rather than Monday of current week, so it truely does show up to 14 days from now. What you want would involve I imagine a new script file to handle the landing page.. don't think you could do it by amending existing files or config. You may want to rethink if you want to have every room showing an entire week on a single page.. sometimes less is more! Out of interest, how many rooms across all areas will you be working with?

There isn't really a time element any more than there would be for making orders in general, as the prices are already negotiated. Perhaps also we have been lucky to have very few problems arise from the remans we now use, so essentially for us the cost really is the cost of the actual cartridges. Printers can and will break whether you use OEM or compats, but I still think if one did go bang, we're still cheaper off to replace it compared to what we're paying to run them. If you'd rather PM that's fine. £28k?? Moving to 36k?!?! I regard that as quite outrageous! Where on earth does that money come from! Even throwing 5k our way would more than double our budget! Same here for compats/remans.. from a company that largely remanufactures their own so they know the process it's been through and thus can diagnose any issues directly.

Are we so fortunate that no other school has a budget for printing then anymore?

RM G-Series and Stone's SFF cases are the same.. the exact same design! They have a different fascia but even that uses the same size and clips and is interchangable. Have you asked Stone how much their cases/psus are?

We run papercut for logging/releasing etc so that side of things is ok. It's more arranging the budget that we need to be careful on. What I don't want is for the head to think that we have "got by ok" on the same budget last year that the same amount would be "max" and there would be further savings available, which there aren't, so if I can give some figures for other schools of a similar size (or other schools in general of any size) it would help the case. Our current fleet largely is colour lasers with monos in offices - a mixture of HP/Brother and Konica Minolta (Konicas in the highest use areas). Our problems mainly is that we have a large variation of printers rather than colidating to a single or handful of different types of printers so we have to stock many types of toners - something I am working on sorting out, gradually, on a non-existant budget! Obviously our environment is different to health so printers in main classrooms are needed (some schools may share a printer for several, but where we have 10+ computers we have to have a printer for that batch! We're not looking for a managed solution, though would be of interest to see what others pay on such an arrangement, if anything to show it'd cost us more!

I have been asked to discuss with our HT tomorrow our printing budget for the next 12 months (well, 10 months now I guess!) and I am curious as to what kind of budget, or expenditure, other schools have in this regard. I am keen for the head to know how our expenditure compares, as I believe I have negotiated some very attractive and value for money deals as far as purchasing toners/inks is concerned. It'd be great if I could get some feedback on the following: - Setup (managed print solution, fully maintained in-house or mixture, OEM/compat carts?) - Devices (specifically looking at just printers, not including photocopiers as we manage that separately and wouldn't be an accurate comparison for me) - Budget/expenditure (how much you usually spend on average every year, how this roughly has changed over the last 2 years and what is your budget/est spending for this year) - Type/size of school (state or private, primary or secondary, # students etc) In our case, we're a ~740 intake secondary state with approx 26 printers and a current annual consumable budget expenditure of around £3500-£3800 + VAT. We manage all our printers ourselves and I negotiate costs with suppliers which for us works out cheaper than managed print setup (though we use 99% compatibles).

We are trying to license a trial version of Cubase Elements 6, however despite our efforts to remove the elicenser.net/.de and port 8443 from the filtering, it still fails to connect to a steinberg server. Steinberg were not exactly overly helpful, and merely just suggesting that the above urls and ports need to be accessible, which they now are and were unable to suggest an approach which would not involve web access. Has anyone experience trying to authenticate the licences through a standard school proxy that maybe is familiar with the problem we are having? Our line has to run through a proxy and we do not have the luxury of having access to a completely unfiltered line.

I guess I won't find much asking here then

I am guessing the E6600 is the Pentium 3ghz one and not the much older Core2 2.4ghz one? It isn't actually "really dated", in fact was released only just over 2 years ago, and only a year before the G620. In saying that, it's on old core 2 wolfdale technology and the G620, whilst slower in actual clock speed, would still outperform it. We are hoping, when we next buy new machines, to go for i3 processors. I don't think the current Pentium lineup will be quite good enough in the years looking forward (seeing as we seem to be on a 7-8 year cycle now)! and the i5 CPUs are out of our budget reach.

Can anyone recommend a good, ideally fairly recent software that contains multiple types of diagnostics on the same cd/drive etc? I am looking at the Win port of ultimate boot CD but can't seem to get it working, even though that itself is several years out of date. Just thinking it would be so much easier to be able to run diagnostics from a single source that would diagnose and test as much hardware as possible in one go. Any suggestions?

Does anyone even use Cubase Elements 6??

Our Music dept currently run Cubase SE3 on rather old Pentium 4 desktops (now 6yrs old) and the inadaquate spec in general is really starting to show. We're looking to see whether we can upgrade these and in the process upgrade to the latest versions of the music software. The equivilant Cubase to what we have seems to be Elements 6. I have three quesitions, with the two main questions relating to licencing: - Where is the best place to acquire 2 educational licences (in the first instance, as we want to see how it goes first). I see Pugh do them - perhaps some suppliers here do too? - I have read the "cheaper" versions of Cubase can now run using a licencing centre/internet activation rather than a dongle. Is this correct, and if so how does that work, and indeed is it a better approach? - Will Cubase SE3 projects be backward compatible with Elements 6 and vice-versa? The latter not so much as important, but we need to know if students can convert and continue to work on the later version and the ability to then be able to still use older versions would be a bonus.

I did yes, nice lie in and a general lazy day. Thanks for asking

When you say normal day, do you mean for yourselves (techie, site staff etc) or everyone (inc students/teachers)? I always thought bank holiday meant just that, and across the whole country! Maybe I am missing something =/

Is this in reference to the physical release station or the web-based release manager gui? We use the latter, where you can login to http://serverip:9191/release (the teachers that is, when they are given rights) and release print jobs from their own classroom workstation. My understanding is that there is just 1 url for this and the filter option is only available once logged in with the list of jobs in front of you. I think that support article relates to the actual release station, where a physical workstation is set up by a printer for the sole purpose of acting as just a means to confirm print jobs (which isn't what we use). Correct me if wrong though!

Looks very close to what I am after! Pity they stopped developing it 4 years ago though :/ I see it uses standard Joomla categories though to display the files, and I can't get the {doc} parameters to work in an custom html module (works in article, but only displays file name)! I am hoping to display the files within an article (via a custom html module) as opposed to having them on their independant page. Obviously there is zero support for it now which is tricky!

There are so many extensions I simply just do not know where to start looking, or even what to look for! Our head wants every newsletter, parent letter etc posted on the website and I have started doing this simply by uploading via ftp and adding to a custom html module the name and link to file, with date. Obviously this is a rather manual approach and means it has to be done via backend. Does anyone know of a very simple extension that allows for uploading of files (ideally via frontend, but not a deal-breaker) that will allow for configurable options (show latest X uploads), with link to file, name and date? Seems to simple in theory but I can't seem to easily find something that fits the bill! On Joomla 1.5 btw.

DaveP is on the right track. We use papercut but you don't need to "nominate" a station - you can configure papercut (or rather, the individual printers) to require authorisation, then there is is an area accessible by anyone (password protected) on any station (so each teacher's workstation or laptop), and they just filter for the printer in their room to show the list of jobs waiting for approval. Some more info about it here. I have been on at papercut to change the system to make it so the printer has to be selected/filtered first rather than showing a list of "ALL" printers/jobs waiting release, as sometimes our staff forget to filter and authorise prints from other rooms. If this was resolved it'd be excellent, but we still use it despite this and it's generally fine.

How do you manage this? We use the CD booting for dban (great software btw) but would be handy to PXE as well!

Couldn't agree more - we have 1 i3 workstation in reception, a couple of Pentium G620s (based on i3 etc) and the rest 50/50 split between Core 2 (conroe and wolfdale) and Pentium 4. The wolfdales are still way OTT for teacher workstations, especially the DC7900s we have with E8400 CPUs which are still beasts and can be picked up for buttons. Obviously if going brand new though, you're looking at the latest CPU range and i3 I still think would be more than needed now, and more than capable in time to come. Get as much RAM as possible - DDR3 is cheaper than water (well not quite, but feels like it!) with 4GB DDR3 sticks available for £12 now, so may as well go for 8GB in the workstations simply because there is barely a budget increase and they'll be monsters when at 64bit!

Thanks for the responses, very interesting reading - I am surprised too that noone has corrected my use of IDE not being solely PATA, as IDE can mean both PATA and SATA right? I guess I should have said "Old PATA HDD..", but obviously everyone knew what I meant though Drive RPM speed isn't the drawback as all our desktop drives are 7200rpm (we don't do green drives, laptop drives in desktop cases etc). I can only see the cache or the actual way the drive is built (in the form of the platters) being the root cause (or as CyberNerd said, bad blocks which I haven't actually checked for.. seems so obvious too!). I don't want to come out and say that the "old age" is making them slow, as I guess that is too generic a comment to make and I don't think the RPM slows down over the years either! If we had the cash then we'd definately look at SSD, but our best bet is trying to get some half-decent refurbs on ebay (SATA, 160GB+)