dgsmith

On the look out for a Micro ATX PSU. I have seen a cheap "budget" brand one on BT Business here for around the £14 mark, though I am a little wary of budget brands. Dimensions of the current one which has blown is 125x100x65 (height sometimes noted at 75 as the fan can stick out the top in some). It's a fairly standard one in there now and looks near identical to the BT Business one. Any suppliers able to quote on a few brands (with varying prices)? Cheers

Well a month later we eventually managed to get USB hubs with power. Took us 3 weeks from BT Business as they kept shipping ones without power (labelling error) but got them in the end. All works fine! It does seem like it was a power issue and now that is sorted, and fairly cheap as well (extenders £10 each, hubs /w power £4 each). Just got to figure out if I go virtual or SANE driver now. The host machines are fairly old (Celeron 2.4 on Northwood core) so I don't know if running virtual machines is doable on them! Still, I think the major hurdle is over.

We can login to our administrator email account, then just change the admin username in the address bar to "..//Inbox" which loads their Inbox, not needing any of their credentials at all (this doesn't work for staff and we purposely haven't set up this capability for staff as we would never have any need to). We're obviously trusted to use this capability when absolutely necessary and when we can justify the reason. In the AUP, it clearly states may login to student email accounts in persuit of a crime/other activities (with permission or supervision from a senior staff member). Students agree that we can do this by signing the AUP. They do, of course, have the option to simply say "no" and therefore they won't get an email account (afterall, we can't exactly force them to have one), though noone yet has declined this. As for irate parents - well, I am sure they would be very irate if their child was being bullied internally, on the school system, and there was nothing the school could do to see what is going on (hotmail etc is a different matter).

oh my...! what the person in the car must have been going through!

Tesco in Litherland, Merseyside was 111.9 on Sunday. They seem to be keeping it as low as possible to put the other station across the road out of business (as this Tesco was only built late last year). Most stations otherwise around here are 113.9 now though.

It isn't set to go down any time soon according to this BBC news article. Petrol is set to go up to £1.20/litre, yet I quote, "the current oil price of about $80 a barrel is far below the $147 a barrel-high seen in the summer of 2008, the last time petrol prices neared £1.20 a litre." Makes me think my lucky stars our local forecore is now the cheapest in the country at 111.9, which itself is still far more than we should be paying, apparantly!

What type of hardware specifically? There are companies that specialise in refurb printers, refurb desktops etc - what genre of hardware are you looking for?

My experience with lasertech was quite good, for a while. I think we stopped using them because the prices were too expensive. As said above, at one point, I was quoted on their HP Q2610A a price that was a little more than a genuine HP toner of the same type. Their reman prices are also high compared to others and we found reliability of some of their HP toners questionable (some leaked everywhere as soon as the tab was pulled). Now, don't say "it's being pulled wrong", because we now use Thomas Computer Supplies for our remans and never had a leaky toner yet and never had one leak as soon as the tab is pulled (ok, had a small few that have caused us problems, but never had one that has leaked). I couldn't fault their customer service though (as said above, this is the local franchise which doesn't necessarily reflect the company overall). Our chap was A+ for delivery and service and for that I was sorry to have to stop using them and problem toners were always replaced the next working day, but we have to factor in price and that wasn't up to scratch. So overall for Lasertech? Good service, but uncompetitive prices.

Sorry I had to pull you up there - 4GB the norm on BUDGET PCs? I don't know how many millions £s your school has to burn, but i'd have thought most schools would be more than satisfied with 2GBs of RAM even on their more superior PCs (with the exception of specialist application use of course). We haven't got 1 workstation that has more than 2GBs of RAM and only 2 servers that have more than that, at 4GB and 4.5GB respectively. We also run RM CC4 which is incredibly demanding yet 2GB seems more than sufficient if the processor is up to scratch. Our next batch of PCs we plan to buy in a few months will still have 2GB of ram, as will the batch after that (unless the price comes down alot, but currently it's going the over way - 2GB ram now double the price it was this time last year)! However, I do agree that IE6 is out of date, but that is what ships with SP2 (I think?) so it may have just been laziness in not updating rather than them not actually wanting to?

Maybe I am being daft, but does this only stop them receiving from students? They are put in a group where they can only receive from "can email students" (staff) but there is no change to their sending restrictions? I appreciate even though they can't receive means the messenger issue is no more, but exchanging work would still be an issue. Obviously don't want to set their message size or recipient limit to 0 as we still want them to be able to email staff.

Thanks maniac - very detailed and much appreciated! Will have a go working through that and let you know how we get on. We're on an RM CC4 network so I hope that shouldn't make much difference - soon find out I guess.

Our's are set aside right?

We have had our email system (exchange 2003) since December 2006 and always had the problem of students emailing eachother and using it like a "messenger" type system. Whilst we have over time tolerated that or at least been able to control it somewhat, it seems now they are emailing coursework to eachother which of course is a big no. Whilst I appreciate they could just as easily email it through their own personal email accounts or share them on pen drives, if we can remove this method it's better than doing nothing (also been meaning to stop it for some time anyway for other reasons). I'm not even sure if it can be done with Exchange 2003 or if we'd need to have 2007 for this. We'd want to continue allow teacher-teacher and teacher-student emailing of course. Any ideas? Yes/maybe/forget it?

This isn't the kind of thread I expected to find around here about this company! Probably won't make much difference, but i'll post my observations of Stone thus far. We bought some laptops from them around Spring 2007. Largely been ok - only problems really have been screws coming out from beneath laptop, causing it to open-up (engineer said it was a known issue on our model) and the DVD drives being quite noisy on these laptops. This is all we have ever ordered from Stone and these are the only issues we have mentioned. Neither have had any major impact and only a few have the "missing screws". We plan to buy new batches of workstations and laptops in the coming weeks/months, and Stone have been very much involved in the tendering process. Can't fault their customer support and account manager has been truely excellent. Had an eval unit from them recently (it was a SFF desktop), and it is just as good as the cases RM offer (which I don't think there are any better than, in my opinion). Was certainly very satisfied with the build quality and durability. Obviously can't comment much on the desktop range having never ordered any, though our eval unit was fine (then again, they're obviously going to triple check those as orders may well rest on the quality of them). Was a bit concerned by the "BIOS settings" etc comments, as that pretty much can't be anything other than a lax approach and poor QC. I suppose these things happen, however much a company may pride themselves on having superb QC, they can be let down by somewhat incompetent individuals making human errors. I know for sure we'd certainly be dissasstified if we bought equipment and found this and I'd certainly be making a point of it if that were the case. Fact is, Stone are getting bigger and I believe they have recently moved into new accomodation and haven't long bought out "Rock" which is now the brand of their laptops. I'm not put off in the slightest by the negative comments here. There will always be some people with bad experiences or who simply are dissatissfied for one reason or another - that's to be expected (in fact, whilst it would be truely amazing for a company to have 100% positive feedback, i'd be somewhat worried if this were the case, as you would have no idea as to what might go wrong in future or how it would be dealt with if such event was to occur). I prefer to know the faults of a company and how they go about addressing them. From what I can gather, the not so good experiences seems to be in the minority and I am sure anyone who has had a bad experience with this company have very genuine reasons for feeling that way, but proof is there is an overwelming majority who seem perfectly happy with the service Stone provide. I don't think it's fair for me to post an "opinion" of them with so little experience of their products. Who knows, should we decide make an order with Stone and find we are having the same problems as the OP, I may well be posting comments more similar to those of the OP.

Stick one on for us please Vicki when you next ship us some toners. Just ordered some cleaning stuff from BT Business as well!

Just got 2 of these from Thomas after having a unit on trial for a week. Build quality is very good (though the unit itself is very heavy!) and speed/quality were fine. Time will tell if they are up for the job!

We have 90% of our computers being RM branded and had little problems. We always get quotes from elsewhere, and that 10% of the time have not gone with RM. We recently got an eval unit from Stone - all electronics (mainboard, processor etc) are identical; even the cases are exactly the same except the front piece (the actual chassis is the same design). RM have Expert (Intel motherboard) and Ascend (cheap Asus motherboards) ranges which obviously differ in price, but again Stone can offer the same ranges too. I'd steer clear from the Ascend ranges as the motherboards in these are quite cheap and I have been aware of problems (we were recently offered the chance to change our order to the Expert series as they weren't able to fix the motherboards in our original Ascend series order quick enough). Don't think that I am "defending" RM or being all "pro-RM" - i'm merely stating we have had little problem with their desktops and that they offer no different to most other suppliers. We don't buy their monitors so couldn't really say. But hey, what RM do or don't offer has nothing to do with the original price hikes mentioned

Stone and RM have a very similar specification on their ranges. For instance, we have been getting quotes recently for desktops from both RM and Stone, and both have been quoting exactly the same (including the new Core i3 which just came out in January). Your comment about RM may have been true some time ago, but things have moved on - they're very much up to date now on their hardware ranges. I'll guess we'll just have to hope it doesn't happen before May, as we predict quote a bit of hardware ordering soon!

Thanks for the info - very useful. We've been quite lazy in the past and always just renewed with RM, but it is best now (this year especially) that we seek alternate quotes from elsewhere so that we can both prove that we're not being ripped off and also to see if we can get it cheaper elsewhere (quite prepared to go with any reputable supplier that gives us a better price). We're a specialist science college (but a normal secondary school); is that applicable to the above? Could we do better than a standard schools agreement?

Is this likely to affect just brand-name products, or will it affect those companies that produce their own hardware such as RM and Stone?

Any suppliers able to quote us for our volume licence agreement (due end of April)? It's a MS School Agreement and computer quantity will be 340. I'm not sure if a school agreement is best for us or there are any better alternatives which would equally suffice our needs for a cheaper cost? Our last renewal described the order as "MS School Agreement Pack Level A" if that is any help.

Quick google search. Only thing to be aware of is that you'll have to periodically check that the quality is still ok (as you are telling the printer to just keep going regardless). It shouldn't do any damage to it at all and the drums are designed to do much more than the quoted 2500/2000 pages. If you want even more mileage when the quality starts to go bad, just take the cartridge out and rock it side to side a bit to redistribute the toner (don't shake or turn it over, as the waste toner may mix with the good toner and cause you problems). Been doing this for a month or two now (we have quite a few of these printers) and I can say the least extra we have got is 200 pages (if historical coverage is high, you're not going to get much more). Black tends to yield more life funnily enough than the colours do when in override, in my experience. Now, does someone know if you can do this on the colours for the CLJ5550?

We seem to use alot more cyan than any other (then again, the main school colour is blue and nearly all uniforms are blue (20% are purple, which uses blue). Photos are the killer unfortunately. I tend nowadays to set our printers to ecomode unless there are either complaints, quality is too bad or they genuinelly need to print proper photos. It used to annoy me alot when we wouldn't get much cartridge life from our HP 2600n printers until I realised you can override the "recommended" replacement message and print sometimes for several 100 pages more (just replaced a black yesterday which did an extra 700 pages when the pages remaining was at 0).

Spot the understatement in that post Good comment, by the way.

Well, we're still waiting for XP SP3 on CC4, so that's even later! Yes, it comes with SR2, but that isn't at general release yet...