Pete10141748

I've used Projector Point before, they are quote good; http://www.projectorpoint.co.uk/projectors/Epson_EMP-S5.html I assume your school doesn't pay VAT, same as mine? Projector for £300 if thats the case

Cheers for the quick replies guys. I checked the things you suggested and they were all OK, I've sorted the problem now by using GPO instead. Cheers, Pete

Between myself and the techie we've managed to cobble together a logon script, but for some reason it will not run when a user logs on! Running it once you have logged in works fine, and does everything we've asked it to do. Any idea's why it won't run? In the "Profiles" section of AD we've set the correct path to the .vbs file, but sill nothing Cheers in advance guys! Pete

LOL someone listens to Terry Wogan's radio show in the morning

We use ReportAssist here. It *can* link to SIMS for pupil names etc. - for some reason our staff prefer not to though..... It uses WordBanks, which I agree is just plain out of order. It always annoyed me when I was at 6th Form / Uni and the feedback sheets were SO obviously generic for the "grade" of the work. Whatever happenend to personal input eh? I remember when my teachers hand-wrote my reports, and they were absolutely about ME....*goes off into nostalgic rant* Anyway, ReportAssist seems OK enough to me, although a pain in the a$$ to get more CDs sent when the 1st ones don't turn up Still, seeing as it's about the only thing that's used consistently (year after year), it's therefore the only thing that the staff don't moan about it, and that's fine by me!

Yeah I get dry skin, usually around my finger joints - not pleasent! I just keep some E45 cream nearby and apply it through the day, it's slowly bringing mine under control. My guess is it's to do with the dry environment I work in, what with sitting less than 1m away from the servers and all.

I agree that creating a "laptop" for under £100 is great on the (schools!) wallets when you consider the "1 laptop to 1 child" we are being encourage to aim for (haha!) However, not with that spec; you can tell where the low price comes from! The EEE Pc from Asus is better, I think. It looks nicer too

haha they all made me laugh! I'll add one, just for the hell of it Why is a Gun better than a Wife? Well, you can put a silencer on a gun. Apologies to the females present

Weekly Maintenance; Server; defrag, backup, log readthrough Desktops (Suite); general walk-around, sit in on a few lessons to check on "real world" useage performance Desktops (admin); defrag, updates, general running tests, backups Every 3-4 weeks; Projectors quick clean with airduster (through fan holes, not taking down + apart), quick wipe of the SMARTboards too. End of each half-term; Server; defrag, disk cleanup, thorough log readthrough, clean outer case and insides with PC Cleaner. Desktops (Suite); defrag, disk cleanup, check logging on / off / sychronisation and general use, software updates (flash, shockwave etc.), clean outer case and insides with PC Cleaner. Desktops (admin); defrag, updates, general running tests, backups, clean outer case and insides with PC Cleaner. Projectors; take apart and clean with PC airduster cleaner, test running / image quality / lamp life, wipe down SMARtboards, speakers etc too. Printers; test print speeds / quality / decide if replacement is needed soon, re-align print heads if needed + print head cleaning etc. replace ink / toner if needed, general cleaning. End of summer term (before Summer hols ) Complete cleanup and testing of everything mentioned above Staff Laptops; updates, cleaning, performance testing, installation requests, + any other jobs which can't be done while they use them for teaching. We have aprox. 60 laptops, 50 desktops, 22 projectors + SMARTboards and 75 members of staff.

...putting Vista onto an iMac? I know this is probably considered a lynch-worthy idea amoungst Mac enthusiasts, but I was just curious! Also, anyone dealt with putting XP Pro on a Mac? I know our regional-coordinator has done this (though I had to wonder why!), any real problems in doing this? Cheers guys! Pete

Whoops! That'l teach me to rush a job Hmm, perhaps I'll take back what I said about them being vey cheap printers as well then! Pete

NOTE: Edited due to bad math's ability as pointed out by nickjones further down the thread! HP1015; Retail price (public price that is) seems to be circa £50, and it reckons it'll do about 2200 printouts. £50 / 2200 prints = 2p per page (obv. cheaper if you get the toner cheaper) HP 2500; circa £200 to replace all 4 toners, around 2500 pages printed. £200 / 2500 pages = 8p per page (again, cheaper if you get the toner cheaper) For what it's worth, I doubt telling staff the costs per page of the printer will have much effect either. In my experience, the costs of printing don't come into staff members' head's at all, they just hit "print" and get thier work; end of. Don't know anything about the Xerox, sorry. Pete

That happened here last week. Got sent a bunch of .docx's from the LEA, couldn't open them on admin machines as we haven't got 2007 yet. OK, I was able to use the converters but it wasn't ideal.

Smart black trousers, black shoes, shirt + smart jumper or sleeveless pullover for me here. There doesn't seem to really be any rules here for dress code. Today the SMT's dress ranged from the Head in demin skirt + brown t-shirty-thing, one deputy in tracksuit bottoms + joggin top, and the other deputy in trousers, shirt and waistcote! The class teachers dress ranges from tracksuits to trousers + shirt / blouse. PE teacher is always in smart tracksuit (if there is such a thing!). Today was bad mind you; one of the members of the admin/reception staff was in an almost completely see-through white shirt! (not that I was looking, but it was VERY transparent :S ) Now no-one can tell me THATs professional female attire in a Primary School! But, nothing was said so what the hell. We've got an INSET day on Friday. Maybe I'll try out one of my Geeky t-shirts, see if anyone says anything; http://img127.imageshack.us/img127/1016/127001shirtkk0.jpg

Yeah I too noticed there a limited range of XP machines on Dell now. I think MS are pushing really hard for manufacturer's to not supply XP anymore. I guess Dell is well within their right to stop providing XP, but they do have a bit of a cheek to ask for £50 to 'downgrade' to XP Professional on most of their machines!

Wifi causes headaches? Thats the biggest load of BS I've ever heard. Just another Daily-mail parent who wants to complain about something. For a start, I'd advise the parent to keep thier child inside a lead cabinet, as these days you are hardly ever out of range of someone's wireless device! (Also I believe the actual amount of signal put out by a wap is hardly any different to recieving a radio signal into a car). Second, the whole mobile-phone thing is a good point, get them to prove it's your wifi and not the mobile. Thirdly, I wouldn't be suprised if the child was sitting in front of a TV / Games console / PC at home for hours on end every night. Perhaps you could enquire as to eyestrain from home being the cause of said headaches? Pete

No doubt that the IT industry is sexist, but at the same time, I'm pretty sure that a national survey would show that the majority of people who are keen on / personally interested in /actually want to work in IT (in the sort of job most of us here do) are male. As for being ageist, well, it almost goes without saying that youger people are going to be better to employ in the long-run than more "senior" people. After all, technology moves so fast, and you need someone who can keep up for as long as possible. Not to provoke "ageist" arguments, but I've seen evidence of this throughout my school here. The SMT, older staff and even the IT coordinator are all drastically oposing Vista / VLP's / anything new, as they feel they can't cope** with such a change and want things to stay the same (i.e. crap but they know how to use what little there is) whereas the technician and I (and most of the NQT's and certainly the kids!) are more than happy with the Vista stuff we have, have great expectations for the Virtua Learning Platform we are setting up, want "helpdesk" software for the staff to report problems to us, and are generally always looking for the next new thing to try out. It's no suprise that as people get older they dont want to have to 'cope' with new things - thats why the Digital Divide came about (the difference between those who like and use technology (under 45's) and those who see no reason/don't want to use it (over 45's). I'm not sure I got the ages right but that's the jist of the "DD".) Hopefully, now that everyone is growing up and having to use technology for almost everything (I'm talking about the younger-than-10's here), things like the Digital Divide won't happen so drastically in future, as everyone will know how to use the commonplace forms of technology which are around and most people will not think much of learning something new, as they have done so throughout their life. **"cope" is a word I hear a lot here from the SMT + 'senior' staff as well. To me, "coping" with something is just another way of saying "I'll put up with it being around but don't expect me to bother learning how to use it / use it at all if I can help it".

3rd party inks? I doubt it! It was hard enough to find where to get the official ones from! As for producing full-colour magazine's etc. well, you couldn't be futher from what they use it for! They just use it to produce lots of copies of lesson plans / sparklebox resources / pupil work. The copier is a total travesty; and I can't WAIT to tell them that tomorrow The worst part is, they'll gladly fork out for this abomination but wont give us a measly £250 for new WAPs, or even new chairs for our office! ) (BTW I work in the same school as Button_Ripple (the OP), I'm the NM he's the Technician; just thought I should mention that or my post would have had people scratching their heads! ) Pete

This happens to a few of our laptops now and again as well. It's usually when a lot of laptops are trying to connect at the same time - a few just don't make it through. By the time they have re-started, the rest are connected so the few that were re-started are fine. This gives the appearance that a re-start solved the problem, when in fact it was just a case of waiting a few minutes until the other laptops had connected. Now we know that, we advise that teachers have their pupils turn on/log in to laptops in groups of 6 (works out 1 table at a time), as that ensures that the WAPs dont get overloaded and there have been no "domain not available" problems since then. Pete

Unless installing Vista is part of your own "move-the-school-over-to-vista" plan, then I'd stick to XP Pro SP2. Pete

Main hobbies are +Music (listening to) +Playing guitar (acoustic, electric, bass + on occasion harmonica with the acoustic) +Learning piano +Learning flute +EduGeek! +CoG (Xbox360 community) +Computer Games! (xbox 360 elite, Wii, gamecube, SNES, DS.....) +Cinema / Movies / DVDs (I have a decent collection, 376 DVDs so far!) +Reading (currently reading Peter Kay's autobiography) +General IT-related geekiness where appropriate +Bowling +Darts / Pool / Snooker + any other game you can play while..... +.....Drinking! (or drunk, for that matter!) and when I get time, I go to work Pete

Instead of hiding the C drive, actually prevent access to it. The option is in gpedit.msc in the same section as the "hide access to these drives" which I'm assuming you used to hide C in the first place. We've done that here and no-one can get in - the only downside is if you want to get into the C drive you need to alter the gpedit.msc setting so that you can get in (might be another way, but I don't know it!). small price to pay to stop student messing with docs&settings and Windows folders. Pete

Wow, most of you guys are lucky! We have 44 computers (30 laptops and 14 PC's) which pupils can use, and just under 400 pupils I believe. That puts us at just under 1:10 pupils:machines (there are about 110 computers in the school in total, but over 50% are exclusively for staff!). It doesn't sound like a lot to say 44 machines for pupils, but somehow they manage to keep us running around all day every day! I have been campaigning to get RMOnes in the IT suite so we can at least fit enough machines in there for 1 per child for when a class goes in there (at the mo it a min. of 2 to 1 machine! ) but so far to no avail. SMT has been fed a load of BS about "wireless networking being the future" and unfortuantely, before I started the job, they bought into it and got loads of WAPs + wireless laptops (which are a BIG headache for me and the techncian!) but, funnily enough, there is not enough laptops to cover the number of pupils in any class the school has! But of COURSE, every member of staff gets a laptop - it's unthinkable they wouldn't, right? Even when pupils are suffering due to having to sit and watch their 'partner' do the work in the ICT lesson, we have to spend our money buying laptops for new members of staff who don't actually really need them (oh, and there's my favourite; the staff who manage to get thier *brand new* £500 laptop stolen out of thier classroom after 1.5 weeks of having it (that really did happen last week!) ) Hopefully I'll have a better ratio by the end of 2009 (though with the way this school goes, there's no guarantee!) Pete

Yup! We've been forcasted for "Heavy snow" on Sunday. Mind you, last time Heavy Snow was forecast, we ended up with clear skies! It WOULD be nice to have a day off on Monday cosof it though - especially with it being the last week before half-term here! Pete

I've used aerospray (cans of compressed air) to blow out the bits that get in between the keys (its also useful for blowing the dust off of old monitors + out of projectors!). Also tried using a screen-wipe but it didn't seem to do much. Keyboards here are mostly kept in pretty good nick thankfully! Pete