dgsmith

Bummer, I guess it's as hard as I thought then?

I created a unique "home" page for our MRBS with some links to the most used features and a list of the next 5 bookings for the user. I want to make a new table which shows all the rooms/resources for the current period, and whether it is booked or available. Looking at how the database deals with entries and times, there is only a difference of 60 between starttime and endtime (this works out at 60 seconds, not 60 minutes). I have being trying to use the DATE(U) variable to try and work out how to extract just the entries for this lesson, but I am struggling! Any ideas how to do this? I have it set up so that there are periods 1-5, then an after school entry (so only 6 slots in each day).

I'd agree with SimpleSi. The price you would have paid for 5 copies of XP, you may as well have spent a bit extra on a laptop that comes licenced with Vista, but downgrade rights to XP (with the disk media too). Would save all the hassle, and at least allow you to go to vista if you so chose.

I found it surprising that a few of you seem to have quite a lot to be honest! We of course get "USB to ps/2" converters when we buy mice, although I guess we all get rid of those little green attachments and just use the USB connector. We have actually bought a few of the "PS/2 to USB" converters (where, you can plug in a keyboard and a mouse and it uses just the 1 cable to plug into the base unit via USB), but we have never got these for free with anything or from anywhere, nor have we ever had more than 3 (and 3 that we have bought)!

Hi there Vicki - about time too

Good spot - under the image!

We have the problem with an Nvidia 8400GS card. Not a fantastic card I know, but I wouldn't say it should struggle with something like this - it isn't onboard and has 256MB of dedicated graphics memory.

I can't remember what we did last time I saw this (I think we got it working, though quite some time ago, I can't remember(!)). I recently installed a video card (pci-e) into a desktop computer to allow it to output onto 2 displays (didn't want a splitter - too many wires), and we have come across this same problem in this scenerio too (the video from PowerDVD only wants to output via the 1 vga port, and black space on the screen connected to the other); exactly the same as the laptop screen/projector situation. Resolutions the same, drivers latest from internet and everything else ok. Haven't tried VLC media player though - may be worth seeing if it is a specific problem to powerdvd.

We have about 5 of them ourself, so I was annoyed when I went to buy one last week and found they were discontinued Would have preferred another of the same (for the reasons you mentioned - easier to manage consumables) but we were in a hurry so I didn't want to wait around seeing if anyone could find one!

I think the 52xx series is discontinued now? It's replaced with the 53xx series which has a slightly higher cap cartridge (slightly higher in price too, so economy is about the same) and with slightly faster throughput. The equivilant version though in the newer model is dearer than the old! If you can get hold of the 52xx series I would go for that - they should be noticeably cheaper for an equivilant model in the 53xx series. I've just this week bought a HL-5340D for £155 from Misco, though I seem to recall the 5250DN (with network) being around the same price when we last bought some a few months back.

I figured as I was comparing it to the 1515n, which I don't believe had compats, that it would be a fairer comparison (some only prefer OEM, the OP never stated though(!)); besides, John (above) pretty much ripped that comparison to bits somewhat That's a fair point, and as we have only ever had Mono Brother printers, I wouldn't know what their colour ones are like to maintain! I still say it's always worth paying the extra and getting a better printer, as if you say "we only have £X to spend now", well, you'll be spending a hell of alot more than that over the lifetime of the "cheap" printer!

The Brother is definately more economical than the HP in running costs. Just a quick check on dabs shows that each colour on the brother is £85 excl VAT for 4000 quoted pages, and the HP 1515 is £40 per colour for 1400 quoted pages (so you get 3000 on the HP for the same price as you get 4000 on the Brother). Not saying that the Brother is very economical though, as it's still a cheap budget printer, but is at least cheaper to run than the HP. If you're budget tight, there isn't any point suggesting more expensive printers, although just bear in mind you'll need more money in the long run to keep it going, so you will probably be worse off over time!

B&W: Brother HL-5250, 6050, HP LJ2300n Colour: HP 2600n (never again.., got about 10 of these), HP BI 2800dtn (good for A3, and cheap), Konica Minolta 5430/40, 5650EN (excellent A4 lasers, 5650 have excellent economy) on LnL scheme I think for our main ICT Suites, we will always go with the LnL PFS scheme printers as long as they run it for. Printers are fantastic, consum. prices on the newer models are always very good and very reliable. I wouldn't touch the CP1515n for an ICT Suite, as it is designed for low usage and you'll find that you'll be forking out a bomb on the consumables, when you could have spent the extra on a proper printer and reap the benefits of lower running costs. We have one in an office used by 1 person and it does the job there, but for a classroom, certainly don't consider it.

Over the summer I installed a graphics card (8400GS) with 2 video outputs into a computer hooked up to a projector (previously it used a video splitter); this has the benefits of freeing up a plug socket, less cables and slightly better performance on graphics intensive apps. It seems when a fresh account logs on, it defaults to setting it up on "extended" screen. I thought logging in as admin and setting the nvidea settings to clone that it would take affect for all users logging in, but this isn't the case. I'm having to change this for each new profile that logs on to the computer! Is there a way to make this automatic on station startup or even upon login?

I'm currently considering an XFX 4850 1GB card for around the £80 mark. I believe GTA5 prefers more than 512MB else I would be quite happy going for a 512MB model! I agree about going for lower, faster graphics memory than just looking at which looks "the biggest", which isn't always necessarily going to yield better performance.

Noone has any ideas then? Nothing at all?!?

Different ranges - curr is 10.73.4/5/6/7.* whereas admin is 10.121.32.* (set by our local county). Only been a problem for the last 2 months or so. If they access OWA via the internet (the external route rather than internally), it is still slow, even though externally it is actually going via the curriculum network, which leads me to believe maybe it is a problem with the clients specifically?

We have 2 separate networks - admin and curriculum, which are joined by a trust for access to sims on the curriculum. Our exchange server has 2 network ports, with 1 each of the ports connected directly to each network. Email access via outlook web access on our admin network is very, very, very slow, whereas it's lightening fast (at least in comparison) on our curriculum network. However, accessing emails via the admin FR server, through OWA, is just as fast as it is on the curriculum; this, we imagine, would rule out config or bad cabling if it is fine on the admin network server (which connects to OWA the same way as the clients). We have tried moving admin workstations to our office (where the servers are kept) and the speed loading/accessing OWA is still the same - slow! We are pulling our hair out over it, and our admin personnel aren't best pleased about it (understandably), especially when teaching staff have a perfectly fine email service. What could possibly be causing it, or where may be a good place to start looking?

I guess only people from Merseyside might use this service - I for one used it as my primary email service until recently when I changed over to gmail (more space). Now I find they have shut it down due to "technical reasons".. Well, it seems there is a bit of a security issues going on. I found this site: Mersey Mail MerseyMail owned by Connect Internet Solutions exposes thousands of Scousers emails to scammers hackers attack, holes and vunerability | LingsCars.com - Blog Apparantly, anyone who sends an email from Merseymail allows themself to be hacked into by the person receiving the email. Thank god I changed over to gmail some time back! Just need to sort out those odd few accounts to websites where I signed up with my merseymail addy! They now only allow IMAP access for the next month (receiving only) - what about all the technically incompetant who can barely turn the computer on - how will they work their way through what is probably technical gobble!

This really isn't a good idea. Teachers WILL abuse the ability to remove bookings from other staff and play innocent when they don't know why it "magically vanished". We didn't go the AD route (though I may look into it in the near future), and simply set up an account for each person (on MRBS's own database). Time consuming, yes it is, but will save the hassle if you bypass any authentication requirements!

kearton, I think you're getting mixed up a bit - it was amvc who posted their intranet which has ink/toner availability, which I myself was curious about too; I don't see why staff need to know - you should be competant enough to always have supplies when needed Liking the design there though webman - I have recently redesigned our intranet to something reasonably straightforward to navigate with (with the usual most used links and search engines) - I like the idea of the internal phone numbers electronically though, and I might steal that idea from you for ourself (we have ours printed currently and everyone gets a hard copy)! Do staff need to login separately or does it tie in with AD to auto detect their status and display the necessary bits?

Super quick response as always! I'm sure this will ease the worries some may have had

Touch wood so far that none of our office basics cartridges has given us any grief. I believe our local supplier will compensate us for the loss of printers from bad cartridges - maybe Simon can post CPLs procedures on that for the benefit of others? We used to buy lasertech cartridges and found that their "own-brand" cartridges had a failure rate higher than what we were prepared to put up with (it was still low, but we expect near 0% failure, not 5-10% of cartridges leaking etc). Also, their prices where too high (at one point, we could get a HP OEM cart for the same price as LT charged for a compat)! We used to buy OEM carts from our local supplier until they told us about their range of compats (office basics & the inferior initiative brand) which we have bought ever since - and noone seems to be able to beat their compat prices!

I can second Office Basics compatibles - our local supplier offers these and Initiative-branded "refilled" cartridges, and we can see straight away the Office Basics ones are superior. We use these now as we can no longer afford to buy OEM cartridges, and they seem just as good as the OEM cartridges. Although we buy them off a local supplier, CPL do the exact same cartridges so it's worth asking Simon about them. The only time we buy OEM cartridges these days is for brand new printers and our admin/office printers (where the documents are often of high importance, and we don't want to risk using compatibles, even though we rarely have any grief from them)!

I was going to say - we have 24 baseunits of spec P4 1.7ghz, 256MB ram with 20GB hard drives to get rid of (no OS licence), but there seems to be better offers above! Of course if anyone else is interested they can PM. Also got some RM Celeron 2.4Ghz, 256MB ram with 40GB hard drives (XP OEM) to do something with as well.. Got a fair few 17" CRTs, but noone wants these anymore - so I guess they will be recycled with the above if we can't find takers!