dgsmith

Would you not be better just getting sticks of 1GB (half the amount of 512s you'd have got) and doubling up the 512MBs in the rest? Seeing as 1x1GB would be cheaper than 2x512MB (I think), you'd be saving money straight away. Also, I don't know why you are looking for different speed sticks? Surely you'd just get the fastest you can get seeing as they would just be downclocked if installed in a machine with lower FSB? It's pretty tough with DDR1 now - we're lucky that we bought a load about 3yrs ago before DDR3 came along and when DDR2 was also really cheap, and just have a few machines dotted around which take it. Obviously the quantity you're after suggests you have a vast amount of these computers which take DDR1 so replacing the units I guess isn't an option. You've tried ebay, but I know there are companies which specialise in refurbishing and recycling old PCs (alot which actually sell on ebay too), who may be able to source RAM for you. I don't really know any of these companies off the top of my head though.

I just checked as that price seems too good to be true - it is, as that price doesn't include an operating system. Great I suppose if you will be running linux or already have full retail Windows copies! It still works out more than refurbished ones though! I believe John @ ICT-Direct now offers full 3yr warranties on their base units now - seems like a no-brainer really.

May be interested in http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/76166-refurbished-machines.html#post678644 as this was only asked a few days ago. £175 for that spec is over priced imo. You can get core 2 for less than that.

Noone has any suggestions?

You can get the standard version of the HP CP2025 at the moment for less than £100 (after cashback) which have reasonably priced cartridges (and the dual pack black works out very good value).

Had one of these printers for just a few months and only printed 1600 pages on it. Today it has started to jam when just entering the output bin (about 5" of paper comes through before jamming) and the error "jam in paper path" appears (and no, not edible jam!). Paper is fresh from a ream and not thick, is flat with no curls and I can't see any shreds of paper lingering inside the printer. Quite annoying. Printer is still under warranty although I figured it may be a very simple fix like paper jams normally are! Anyone had a similar problem? Error code is 13.0000 which doesn't tell me much more than I already know!

At 61 FTE, you must be getting quoted about £50 per head? That seems way overpriced - we have 75 FTE (an average sized secondary school) and we're paying just shy of 2.5k. At 61 FTE i'd estimate a 2k annual cost. Heck, even on SA you'd be looking at 100 PCs x ~£25 per desktop = £2500, so £2000 for EES and £2500 for schools agreement, annually. I am basing this on our historic pricing structure (SA) and recent quotes when we got EES in April.

Tier1Online - a very wide range of equipment at reasonable prices Cambridge Used Computer Shop <- REALLY CHEAP!! - got a HP CP3525n off them last week for £50 including postage and a HP DC5700 for £99. Hawk IT Systems Limited - had some Dell 745s for £58 from them Misco also do refurbs but at the upper end of the price scale. ICT-Direct may be the priciest but given they offer a very reasonable warranty this I think works in their favour.

We have one in perfect working order that we'd rather not have, as it's the only one we have and just means having to stock an additional different type of toner. If you're near West Lancs we could work something out?

Had an email through from SCC yesterday (one of those promo emails we all hate) - they had 46 Samsung N145-JP02 netbooks open-box, brand new, unused with full warranty. These go for around £185 normally - they were selling them for £136.50 each!! Just grabbed 32 of them - amazing price! Despite the saving though, we still couldn't afford an extended warrranty at £26 each extra..

There is indication that the distro is redhat linux too which doesn't give me much hope. I have yet to get any response from my email to them as well - anyone know of a direct contact?

The system line when I check phpinfo notes: System Linux waitaha 2.6.18-194.8.1.el5 #1 SMP Wed Jun 23 10:52:51 EDT 2010 x86_64 The build seems fairly recent (Jun 2010) so I don't know whether this build actually does have such an old version of php or if cleo/westfield are purposely running an older version..

mysql client API version states 5.0.77. I think this should be ok for Joomla 1.6, but only just (not if it was a Win box though as that would need 5.1).

Thanks, i'll send an email and see what they say. I fear though that it may take a number of people for them to get a shift on on this and then some time - I doubt my email alone would make them jump into gear! I hope I am wrong, I really do! I can't see the school being willing to pay for webhosting regardless of the reasons, unfortunately!

So i've just gone to seriously consider upgrading our school joomla installation to 1.6. I've waited until a few releases after the initial one (just to let them squash those initial bugs) and until the template we're using received an update for 1.6 (which it did a week ago). Great I thought - with the exception of some less-important addons we'd be in a position to do this. Wrong. Joomla 1.6 needs PHP 5.2.4 or higher (which was released Aug 07). Seems the servers where our school site is hosted in west lancs still uses PHP 5.1.6 from Aug 06! Google searching suggests there isn't a way around this other than to upgrade PHP. A bit stuck now! Anyone from Westfield/CLEO I could contact to let them know this? I am sure there are others who will want to upgrade but can't because WF/CLEO would rather use a PHP version nearly 5 years out of date!

I'm currently looking to find companies that sell refurbished desktop hardware seeing as we will have to expect this to be the only means of upgrading our hardware for the foreseeable future. Had good experiences with ICT Direct's hardware however it's always good to know of as many as possible, particularly when you need to get several quotes and be able to justify costs with a particular supplier! Tier1Online seem to have quite an interesting variety of refurb hardware (Dell Optiplex 745, 755, HP DC7800, DC7900, Lenovo etc). I hadn't heard of them until yesterday when I did a google search and initial contact with them suggests they work with schools and accept PO/invoice payment which is good. Just wondering if anyone here has dealt with them before and can express some opinions on how good the equipment is, aftersales service etc? Their prices are very appealing at least!

Thanks bossman; first link dead?, 2nd I have been through before but couldn't see anything appropriate and 3rd is blocked by our county, though I suspect it's the standard user manual anyway?

Well, unfortunately we neither have a local enough school with a spare printer nor one that uses this printer to loan OEM toners to us.

Great printer and great quality prints, but damn are we having a nightmare with this at the moment. Started with the paper jamming in the fuser with 54.18 errors and "toner remaining sensor" errors. We figured this was the sensor unit between the fuser and the black toner (as the paper wouldn't "jam" as such, just the printer would stop dead when the paper was ejecting and being picked up, leaving a piece also on the transfer belt). We replaced this unit - this didn't help. It seems now we are getting calibration errors on all toners and the printer will print about 5-20 pages before throwing this error again. What is worse, is that if you let the printer try and calibrate, the error will always appear and effectively render the printer unuable (it's a blocker error). I am having to resort to skipping the calibration on powerup (using the menu procedure when turning on), therefore we are using a printer that has not calibrated for some weeks - not good! Errors are as follows and continue as far back as the error log goes: Toners are compatible, but have worked fine for over 10k pages. We can't afford to buy OEM toners but don't want to replace all compatibles, most of which are very full, unless there is a convincing case to do so (or if all else fails).. Please don't say "compats are c**p, use OEM instead", as that won't really help us!!

We've been solely Intel the past 2 years, but mainly out of ignorance regarding AMD's latest offerings. Whilst the AMD you note is a 6 core compared to the 4 core Intel, it seems the Intel still beats the AMD in benchmarks, maybe due to higher clock speed per-core. The Intel is also using the 32nm fabrication (as opposed to the AMD on 45nm) giving the Intel one the usual performance, lower power, cooler operation etc advantages. Benchmark here for the AMD, with the Intel 8 CPUs above it. I think based on the benchmarks the real-world difference would be negligable, but currently (and out of personal preference mainly), i'd choose the Intel.

Well we're looking at 2x quad core E5640 2.66ghz (new westmere), 8GB RAM and we're pondering 4x 300GB SAS in RAID 5, which I think gives us just shy of a terabyte HDD space. Our current Server1 has 250GB usable space, and servers 2 & 3 have 200GB each roughly of usable space, so 900GB seems like a massive step up. Single site and although we have a separate admin (SIMS) domain, this is setup on trust and no clients use this domain. I suppose the spec above should also be enough should we ever wish to go to a virtualised route in the future (we want it to be future proofed too)!

Thanks for the replies. The main reason we went 3 servers originally was because when we got a new FR, we knew this would be it for quite some time due to no money (3yrs ago), so figured we'd be better having 2 older servers to share the additional load than just 1 older backup server (and also as these are now more prone to failure). There is pressure to reduce ongoing annual costs so we need to really know whether we can afford to go back to 2 if we get quite a high-end one. Looking back at previous orders and doing a google search, it does seem going SAS is better? Quite a bit more, but then is it not better to get the best you can? Definately want to look to teaming, but would this make any real-world difference to performance of the network if this server is to be a secondary one? daz191, do you find 2 servers with that many clients is ok? I'd have thought for that size network at least 4 DCs would be a minimum necessity!

A bit of background: RM CC4 network 3 AD servers (FR + 2x DC) Approx 340 desktop/laptop clients 710 students, 75 staff The question is about the main servers which handle logons and user areas and generally the backbone of the network, as opposed to member servers (such as SIMS, intranet, filtering etc). We currently have 3 servers, with 2 of them being long overdue for replacement (3rd server purchased '04, 2nd server '05). We are wondering whether it would make more sense (financially) to replace servers 2+3 with a single beefy server that has more power than any single server would normally have? My thought is that, if we really go the whole hog then we'd be looking at 130% the cost of what we'd normally pay per server, but would this route be viable or would we notice any drop in performance regardless of how powerful the server is? As RM charge hardware and software support annually per server, and we're looking to cut our energy bills too, this is something we are considering. We're not in a position to consider virtualisation and we have no SAN (pretty much a very basic network setup). We normally go for SATA HDD so i'd imagine we'd look to get 15k RPM SAS HDDs and utilise the dual network ports for added bandwidth.

It's not up to me to issue bank account details - I can't give them without permission! Well I phoned the number above (UK), got transferred to a department in Germany, they couldn't help and suggested I call the UK, which I had to begin with! GRR! What number did you call pooley?

Bursar not liking the idea of giving out bank details. I can't argue really - it's not my place to. Thanks Max_Power for the number and pooley for the info - I may just phone them anyway and ask if I can do it all over the phone!