dgsmith

We moved into a new office summer 2008. There are 2 of us and we have 3 areas to our office: the main room where we work, where the entrance is and where we deal with day-to-day requests the workshop next door which houses the main cab and a reasonably sized workbench a separate server room next to that which houses.. servers! Workshop and server room where taken from the LRC next door when that was refurbished, and a new door was fitted in our main room for access. All 3 rooms have air-con. Our old room before this was somewhat squashed (3 people in an office smaller than the 2 of us have now). Visitors who come in do compliment our area, and engineers who come to work here (fixing equipment etc) seem happy that they can sit "out the way" with plenty of space We also have a reasonably sized storeroom to hold.. storeroom stuff!

Yes, it was a little amusing. Made up for the annoyance mentioned above

I'm sure Simon/Joe will give you a quote if you ask nicely We ordered a few extra things too (like extra cards) so paid a tad more but not really too much more. We got a Magicard Pronto machine. Does the job for us, (the Securit one), however I wouldn't rely on the included software to design the card. I did something quick and dirty in paint.net which looks pretty good, then we imported that as a background.

There was a recent post here asking the same thing (by us). We went with CPLTD for our Securit solution which came next morning! I agree there isn't much point but it seems like a compulsory option rather than voluntary.

Celeron has a bad reputation in the past, however the new generation are actually quite good - i'd favour the E3300 over the AMD you mentioned (it's the same as the Core 2 except it has less cache, but even at 1MB cache that is acceptable for the price). However, Intel also have the Pentium Dual-Core E6500 which is clocked at 2.93ghz, 2MB cache, 1066mhz FSB and comes in just £10 more than the E3300. If you on a wafer-thin budget (I know how that feels), i'd definately go for the E6500. The CPU is something you probably won't change once it is in, as opposed to ram which can be increased anytime. Neither are particularly outdated processors as mentioned above (the Celeron uses the 45nm technology which itself is now 2 years old, however the CPU itself isn't that old and scores higher in speed). Just my 2p. [Edit] Sorry just realised you are looking at pre-built PCs rather than self build. I'd still take the Celeron though. As far as I know, the AMD is only single core with 0.5MB of cache, whereas the Celeron is a dual-core with 1MB cache.. [/edit]

Not at all, there are enough standard USB ports on computers these days (even those from several years ago) to accomodate the quantity of scanners i'd be looking to use I suppose the only way to know is to try it as already said.. I may just buy the extenders and hope for the best; if all else fails, at least the computers will be centralised. I can't see any reason for students to unplug the scanner though (not like a computer where they don't like "being monitored" - the scanner isn't any threat to them) I suppose the same problem could arise in event of a power cut, would the scanners know which VM to go back to, or even if the host PC is rebooted manually? I read on the Canoscan guide that there seems to be a dropdown where you can select which scanner you want to configure. The obvious reason for this seems to be because you can choose separate config for each scanner; either that or so the program knows not to configure any other non-canon scanner device that may also be attached. Even if I get round that problem, I fear I may still have a driver limitation issue to deal with (this is in the non-VM scenerio). That's the thing - funds do not allow at all, hence why i'd be looking at the "value" (cheapest) USB extender I can find, simply because anything that costs anymore is outside of our financial reach. This is also the reason why we adopted this setup in the first place as it meant we could use existing hardware at no extra cost to achieve essentially the same setup as one which is achieved using an actual network scanner. Plus, there are only 3 buttons on this setup, and nothing that can become "unconfigured" or messed with

I am regularly in ~25-30 IRC channels, of which less than 5 I ever communicate in (quite bad I know, but by no means am I in a minority). I went in this irc channel for a few days however there was barely any activity it seems. Shame really I suppose..

I've just bought this remote from RM at £6 and this one for the same model you described (one is the very slim/flat remote the other is the slightly bigger one with more buttons). I also got a few other remotes of the other types as we have loads of different generation Epson projectors. We have the S1H and the S3H which gets confusing though! It mentions a different projector model number on the RM site however google searching seems to suggest the remotes look exactly the same. There was a one listed specifically for the S1H+ here, however not paying £28 for a remote! I'll take my chances with the £6 one

I'm hoping it won't be a problem - i'd understand if the distance was long but the distance really won't be too long at all (12m max). The extenders I am looking to use are these from BT Business which are cheap but hopefully would do the job. I'm thinking maybe using virtual machines may be the best way of achieving this, especially if the scanner config in the registry is only setup for 1 scanner!

How would this differ from using standalone XP stations we have now? My two aims are to remove the machines into an attended environment (our office) and reduce the amount of them so as to cut down on wasted power. I thought about this, however as the runs aren't too long (we're next door to the ICT areas practically) this shouldn't be too much of a problem. We also run IP cameras over PoE which have distances around 50m - these scanners will be nowhere near that distance from the cab though!

Thanks for the input chaps. I'm not sure in which context you mean "hub"? If this method worked, the plan would be to plug each scanner into its own USB port on the motherboard, rather than using 1 port and splitting with a hub. I can see in the device manager that each port is assigned 500mA and that is exactly the amount these scanners use, so I am hoping that power shouldn't be of concern. The usb extenders over cat5 I have my eye on unfortunately don't have an external power supply (the expensive ones do), however as cat5 can transmit power easily, and these devices are designed to imitate a single USB cable, I hope this shouldn't be an issue. That is a good point and besides the fact that the standard windows TWAIN driver may not be capable to operate two scanning devices at the same time, I hadn't thought of registry config. I suppose any probllems in attempting this approach would be down to software limitations as opposed to hardware limitations. I've even considered virtual computers within the host PC but that is starting to seem overkill for a solution that does already work now. Then again, I suppose once it is setup, it can just be left.. As I said before, I see there is a SANE project to allow many scanners to be shared/used over the network, however I barely know anything about it and alot of it involves the *nix platform to which my knowledge is scarce.

I think he meant that as you only said you have 1 with a broken floppy drive plate, can you not take said plate of the other broken fascia that has different damage? This happens to our machines from time to time, however I normally keep the broken ones as spares, given there will only be 1 part of it broken, and there are several other parts to the fascia that are still intact.

Our photocopiers are in 1 place and students aren't allowed to use them. Our scanners are in each ICT room and students are encouraged to use them. The setup we have now is simple, however I always thought there was room for improvement without changing the setup entirely. I've read a little into SANE (alternative to TWAIN driver), however i've no idea how that works or how relavant it is..

With the scanners in our school, the setup we have is that each scanner has a host PC which when the button is pressed on the scanner, the scan will save in a shared area (thanks to dhicks for suggesting this some time back)! Whilst this is all good, it does mean we have to have an unattended PC by each scanner, not only wasting power but also prone to being "knocked" or turned off/unplugged and then people wonder why it doesn't work! I have thought about buying some USB extenders over cat5, which in theory would allow me to connect these USB scanners to this extenders, and for them all to terminate in at our cab, where just a single host PC would handle all the scan requests. Is this doable? Before money is spent on these extenders, I want to know whether it is possible to have multiple scanners attached via USB to a single PC and for each to operate independantly (each scanner has different config and saves its scans to a different folder and can also scan if another scan is happening). It would save us some money in power and mean the computer won't be the cause of the problems we sometimes see now. For ref, the scanners are all Canon Lide 20 (quite an old model).

So we eventually got through to MLS on the phone (long wait). It seems it needs the character ~ before the code to work, once they told us this it was fine! Also annoyingly, they said if our old barcode scanner is faulty, we can send it back to MLS and they'll fix it for free and send it back for free! Just to let anyone else know that in case you buy a new one like we did.

That's the odd thing - in notepad it just appears as the code read and a line break, yet in MS Word or Wordpad, it adds a bulletpoint or number point at the start of it. That is the ONLY difference we can see, but it must mean something otherwise it would work, right?

Any chance you could send those barcodes? I have looked in the book config although unless you know exactly how it is meant to be setup, it's a little tricky! It seems you can add things before and after (as I said the old scanner added bullet points) but understanding it seems harder than first thought..

We've just this week bought a Wasp WCS 3905 scanner from Misco (link), and found that whilst the scanner itself works and will read a barcode, it doesn't seem to fully work in Eclipse. There is an barcode config dialog in Eclipse where you can scan a barcode and it'll tell you if a config exists - it doesn't find one for the new Wasp scanner and even making a custom entry doesn't work (it finds a config obviously when using the old scanner though). We can scan for books when in the catalogue and it picks it up, but struggles to detect the book when in the circulate area. It seems with the Wasp scanner, it adds a carriage return after the barcode whereas the old scanner didn't and added a tab/bullet point before the number - whether this makes any difference I don't know! Any suggestions what we could do? Are these scanners reprogrammable (I can't see any drivers)? We have contacted MLS but they are slow in responding and our librarian would like it sorted asap!

We're about to start using scratch in IT. As we are running scratch from a public shared drive (not locally installed), it isn't associating the scratch project files to .sb. Whilst I know you can add a reg key to associate extentions to a program of your choice, what happens is that every time scratch loads, it then asks for an image file (which is located in the root of the scratch directory on the shared drive). However I want this to be seamless, and even choosing this file just loads up a blank scratch project rather than the saved one. Going into scratch normally and browsing to the project manually loads it up fine, but I already know not having the .sb files go to scratch will be a nightmare! Anyone gone down the same route as us or just installed locally?

Just be lucky you haven't had 5 powercuts since the start of 2010! Getting a bit daft now, and we only have 1 UPS which can only cover our essential servers. Oh, and guess who's fault the powercuts are?

Thanks to Vicki at Thomas Computer Supplies for sorting this for us at a superb price. Arrived this morning, installed and the teacher is very happy! =)

I tend to check every communal printer on a regular (usually daily or every other day) basis (web admin interface). I know which ones aren't going to run out any time soon and which ones are, and also which ones go through cartridges the quickest. For some I'll always have at least 1 cartridge in, others (such as the HP 2600n) i'll have 2 of each as we have alot of those printers. With our longer lasting ones (the HP P3005n has a 13000 yield cartridge and lasts about a year) I only tend to order 2-3 months before that time, unless I get a good deal (open box, pristine). Some staff have their own printers which they are responsible for, although I am quite happy to make orders for the consumables on their behalf if they let me know in advance, or as and when needed. Some people prefer to make 1 big order annually, others do it "as and when". I guess I am in between, but as I know our printers inside-out, I know exactly how many of each toner i'll need for which printers! I try to do a stockcheck every 1-2 weeks and keep that on a spreadsheet so if I ever order something, I can refer to that for anything else we may need. We use papercut (could do with updating it as well!), and dept (staff) usage is charged to their department papercut account, and every half term the balance is transferred into a central "printing" budget. All consumables are paid from that. Don't deal with paper, so don't have that worry!

Sorry Simon didn't notice you had replyed to this thread! Yes we sent several unblock requests and got no response. It had actually purposely been blocked rather than just being "uncategorised". How did you manage to pursuade them?

Same here! I must say though, even though we're particularly picky about the brands of some of our items, Vicki gets it sorted quickly if there is ever a mistake! Been quite a while now though since you visited our neck of the woods Vicki..

Best price for an Epson EMP-S3+ projector lamp (ref #V13H010L33)?