Pete10141748

Buy a copy of Bioshock for Windows, sit in your techie's room at school, and play away. If the Boss enquires as to what you are doing, simply reply that you are testing the imaging capabilities of the laptop, and that the work you are doing will now have to be re-started due to the interuption Pete

You'd be suprised how many teachers I've seen who put up 1 image at the start of a lesson and do nothing more with the board than leave it there for an hour, yet will complain if it would go off, claiming that they are still "using it". Yesterday, I walked into a classroom to find uniforms on the floor, the kids+teacher all gone outside for an hour of P.E., and the WB+P on with the words "get changed for PE" written on the WB. It now appears that NQT's are losing the ability to speak! Pete

HI! Pete, network manager of a primary school in bedfordshire. These forum's are great! Humour & information, good stuff.

We found some great uses for our old server. For a month it acted as a very nice footstall under the workbench in the office, then it became a very nutritional lunch for the skip! Oh, and we also gutted the poor thing and removed all it's componants, which are now adorning the shelving in the office, gathering dust and generally looking like crap, with the exception of the 1Gb RAM, which we put in a Windows 2000 machine to keep it running until the grip on the school's wallet is released by the powers that be We tried to put the HDD in one of the admin PC's, but it turned out that the PC already had a bigger HDD than the server's old one 8O Yes, it really was that bad

GT: "GeekyPete" Xbox360Elite player, love it in black. GH3 rocks, GoW is awesome, and totally addicted to Worms&Tetris on acrade!

We have ours locked down so that staff can't install programs and so have to come to us to do it for them. Other than that, we generally just let them use it. It seems like no matter what we do, staff ignore our policies and the senior members of the staff who actually *could* put disicplinary actions in place just dont care. "you can't ban them from the network, you can't take away their access, you can't give them any sort of punishment at all, even if they break every law under the policy which you wrote to protect the school from liability. you're here to fix any problem that (they) might cause in the process of using the laptop un-trained, and as long as they somehow manage to make something work and can teach, you just fix problems and keep quiet" seems to be the feeling around here. I don't think that anyone has quiet got the idea yet that we *are in charge* of the network and all the ICT equipment, and we are *not* just repair-men sitting in the server room in the dark waiting for someone to cause an issue.

Has anyone found a good way to get teachers to turn off their blasted projectors when they aren't using them? We have about 20 projectors in classrooms in school and every single lunchtime I am forced to walk around and turn off loads of them. ARGH! I know some of them have auto-off after-certain-amount-of-time features, but this has proven to be an unpopular idea with staff who are afraid that the projector will turn off in the middle of their lesson. Closest I've come is to send round a memo detailling just how much it costs to keep replacing bulbs, blown from overuse that is not actual use; this only served to get me in trouble from the head's, who felt that my note was "offensive". What's a guy to do? Feels like I am banging me head against a wall here; they want the best out of everything, but offer no compliance to do so! I've gotten to the point of not bothering to turn them off now, in the hope that the ever-growing cost of bulbs will make some of the more senior members of staff rasie the issue. Any thoughts?

Yeah, add some snow to whatever you already have. You want to avoid making it a "Christmas" wallpaper as this is a religious theme and therefore could be considered un-pc to advertise on religion and not any others (stupid I know, but what can you do?) and instead just make it a winter-holiday-festival-themed background. I know at our school we were not allowed to celebrate Halloween as it was a pagan festival - not even a pumpkin screensaver!

Are the laptops wireless? It could be that a driver for a wireless card is not running correctly and causing the laptop to not recieve an IP address when it is turned on; it could also be that turning on all 30 laptops is causing too much traffic through a WAP at one time - a problem which we are experiencing right now. At my school we had the same problem with Winsuite, albeit with fewer laptops (approx 15). In the end we scrapped Winsuite altogether and went with making our own profiles using offline files/synchronisation and policies in gpedit/regedit. This decision was helped by the fact that Winsuite is no longer going to be supported or updated, resulting in a "get out while you can!" feeling. Good luck with solving the problem. Pete