dgsmith

Does anyone know of free software which can poll printers and grab info such as remaining ink/toner, page counts etc? I know spiceworks does this to an extent, however it is rather slow and we only want the printer polling functionality. Simply, we're just looking for a way to easily overview our printers in 1 area and see from a glance which consumables we need to make sure we have! I appreciate all printers are different and we can't expect it from all of them, however most of our printers are pretty standard (mainstream modern HP and Brother lines) so hopefully we should be at an advantage there.

So select which day it is to be repeated on? Works ok for us doing that.

There are various avenues already open to us, however I felt it may be good to see if any edugeek sponsors are in a position to fulfill, whether fully or partially, our request. Alas, not looking hopeful here eh! John from ict-direct has been very helpful and offered to fullfil our dell request, however since we also seek the toshiba screen surround, I also thought i'd throw the dell bits in too, just in case!

They are certainly worth considering, which is why I put a request out here, as it is my hope that any suppliers capable of supplying may respond

Looking for some prices on the following: Dell 505 charger Dell 505 keyboard (could be pre-used if condition is good) Toshiba L100 screen chassis (the frame for the screen is cracked, but the screen itself is ok, so we are looking for prices on the plastics).

Adobe were running a scheme for anyone who bought the CS3 product in a specific timeframe, got CS4 for free. We bought CS3 in that timeframe and were eligible. No hidden extras, no hidden costs, all above board. Of course, this was last year and the scheme has long since ended.

CS3 for £5400 (excluding VAT) and upgraded to CS4 at no extra cost. Did (and still do) have problems assigning it to workstations over the network. Support isn't overly great.

Like yourself, we only needed a handful of the programs (dreamweaver and flash for ict, photoshop and indesign for art and graphics). It seems we can make use of a few others as well which is handy and it was cheaper buying the whole lot than bits. It worked out better for us to buy the design premium edition, however we bought it with CS3 and upgraded it for free (CS3 was cheaper than CS4 is now, afaik). Our licence covers us for 500 I think it is, and something likle 50 off-site licences (that's computers, not users).

You're quite right - time was getting on a bit then so my brain wasn't in the right gear So, you're converting it to a DMY date and using that to compare with "today"? I'd be interested what you come up with, as I am sure others would be too, though most of our staff only have at most 2 bookings in 1 day! I did encourage anyone to improve what I had, so it's great you are giving that a go and willing to release your changes! What I really, really wanted to do was email reminders (through exchange) - frustrating when they "forget" and I tell another teacher they can't have it because it's taken!

Just wondering, is that "some guy" me, who released a pretty much raw file of code to do what you are describing? If so, i'd be interested to hear why you had troubles with it (not that I guaranteed it of course, if it was my code you're describing) What are these extra features too? I'm sure others like myself would be interested if you can implement what you suggest! A complete wild guess, but I were trying to get next day/week etc, i'd query for entries which fall within the current timestamp (now) and how many seconds difference until the day after (maybe with some trial and error), and use that range (ie: time greater than now, but less than X, where X is how many seconds until 24hrs after now) in the sql query to filter it down. Likewise for the next week too. I can't remember the database setup off the top of my head though, though in theory, it should be quite simple i'd have thought.

We can get the TN3170 (7k pages) for £65, or the TN3280 (8k pages, for the new series) for £75. So, it's £10 more yes, but you get another 1000 page yield? Certainly isn't "another" £40 per toner - i'd be interested if you tell us who is selling it at this price point? Are you sure you're not comparing it with the TN3130, which only has a 3.5k page yield? I can see the price of the printers on this series has increased in comparison to their counterpart on the older series, that is the only thing though. I can see us buying the above printer (the new series) when we need to replace our mono printers (just unfortunate we would need to stock another type of toner and drum when the time comes).

yes I know the topic is a few months old, but I found it quite interesting myself how other schools work on projector replacing! We only just took out some 3M MP8625 (nice huge things) from service in summer just gone (although, admittedly, they were so bad that they didn't see daily use the last few years, but were ok for watching a video or dvd, but not for computers (max resolution supported was 800x600). We still use some Hitachi projectors for mobile purposes (presentations where there isn't a projector), and these are over 8 years old, yet still work ok (albeit, very dim!) The oldest we have in regular use are some Sanyos bought in summer 2002, and although again not as bright as they used to be but still usable. Our only gripe with the oldest projectors is the resoltion. The ones which are native with SVGA don't look as sharp and easy on the eye as our XGA projectors, and now that is becoming a problem with widescreen laptops. However much we'd like a replacement policy on projectors, we just can't justify it, and really are stuck on a "if it aint broken" approach. Plus we are struggling financially this year which doesn't help! In an ideal world, 5-7years sounds reasonable.

Must admit, I hadn't explored this avenue. I have given this a try, and all looked good at first, but then saving creates an xml file (I assume the settings in the management tool), and publishing creates an mst file, neither creating or amending an msi file ready for distribution. Am I missing something very obvious?

Noone ever edits MSIs themselves??

We pay £32 (2600n) with free delivery (black and colours) - what are your delivery charges on those for good comparison? Also, sorry to hijack your thread OutToLunch, but I guess my queries would equally be your own!

Those 2600n prices are quite impressive (in fact, the cheapest I have ever seen compats for). Can I confirm whether they are in fact compat cartridges or remanufactured (refilled essentially)?

I'd be interested too whether there are any compars for the CP1515n (we have one of these, and given it's a cheap printer, it's not very economical on cost). We pay £32 each for compats on the 2600n (they alternate between initative and office basics branding).

You may also want to post the specific printer model so others could say whether they have had similar experiences with that type?

We have a custom Smartboard 10 MSI package which needs to have a "Downloaded Installationw" folder copied to an internal user's documents and settings folder, otherwise the installation doesn't finish. We find ourself having to manually copy this to each machine we install the package to and having to log in as an admin user, which then asks to locate this folder to finish the installation (if we copy the folder before logging in, it'll find it straight away and finish automatically). How can we edit the MSI to make this folder copy during the installation? In my experience with MSIs, you have components and each component refers to an individual file - there are 100s of files in this folder! We just literally want to copy the folder into a particular area - can this be done as easily as we want? In our case, the folder we want to copy to is "C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\Local Settings\Application Data".

I'm not brilliant on styling with html myself (it just serves a purpose really, no fancy css or anything)! The script itself as I uploaded is actually very basic, as was definately welcomed by staff as an easy way just to "check" if they have booked a room and forgot (to save trawling through all the rooms or the horrible report feature)! I must confess that the theme is downloadable from oswd.org here, so I take no credit for that, only for integrating it (with some difficulty) with MRBS! Student network status on the screen is nothing to do with MRBS - it's just a link there as I am using the user database from MRBS (we don't have AD authentication), given that we only wanted staff to see it - was easier using MRBS authentication! It is going off the original query of the OP though to find a suitable system. Whilst MRBS is good (because it's free!), it isn't necessarily 100% suitable in it's vanilla state for everyone. webman's system, although never tried by myself, does seem to be orientated towards the school environment (especially the 2-week timetabling, which I desperately would like in mrbs)!

No problem, I have attached my bookings.php file (had to rename to .txt as it wont accept .php file type). This is only the code that will allow the overview booking so you would have to create your own account area if you wanted (the code in the attachment is the same pretty much as "the next 5" bookings in the account area. Not sure about it showing next 50 though, it seems to show them all. By all means, if someone can improve upon what I have done and release their own modified version then i'm sure that would be appreciated too! The one I have uploaded works on mrbs 1.4.1, however if you want it on mrbs 1.2, then you need to swap the commented lines over on 2 parts (you can see in the source where I have put a line for 1.2 and 1.4). Not tested fully on 1.4 (as we use 1.2) however on my test install it seems to work ok. bookings.txt

In the case of the screenshots above, this isn't a problem as they are custom php files which didn't have any original in MRBS, so they wont be overwritten. However, I have also modified original MRBS php files (like to prevent viewing data so many weeks in advance, and to assign staff to their department, and for that department to have access to a particular week first). In this instances, the code would be deleted during an upgrade, so we still use the older version of MRBS!

I haven't turned back since using MRBS. I must admit, I didn't like the default theme as it was lacking some features, however I have heavily modified it over the years to suit our needs (only thing I haven't done yet is a mod for 2-week timetables). I still hack bits now and then though, and there are areas of our's unfinished, but the main thing is it has alot of potential. Even then, the vanilla version still does the basic job (and will still be far improved than the paper system you have now). Screenshots below are actually of MRBS, just with ALOT of modification! I added a completely new module so that you get an account section when you login, and an area where you can see all your bookings (overview).

Our county hosts the moodle so I don't even think we have ftp access (as far as I know, we just have admin access to our moodle installation, via moodle)! Is the only way to do this by having some sort of access to the installation directory? Can we not edit/modify the necessary files/folders via moodle?

Our ICT teacher informed us that the icons don't appear for office 2007 based file types (given the extension changed and there is nothing in the server for it). I have seen 2 options: - Upload the new icon sets for office 2007 and edit the necessary files to look for these - Add entries for docx/pptx etc to copy their respective doc/ppt etc icons Trouble is, our moodle is hosted externally and we don't have direct access to the server, so I don't know how we should go about trying either of them! I've got the above info from this moodle forum topic. Any advice/suggestions?