Deaks

It's worse than that! You have to pay MORE for the managed service than you used to for what you did in-house and had complete control over. You don't get new money to pay the managed service bill. Once it's all supplied and installed you have to start paying for it. One of the Academy's in Bristol had to pay so much for the VLE that there was no money left for computers. They have less than 100 PCs (inc. all desktops and mobile devices) for their 800 students to use.

There's a whole Forum for BSF, check out the various threads there.

Just had a meeting with our outgoing-head and his official line is that yes there haven't been any meetings for six-to-eight weeks regarding the work that was due to start this summer in our school, but it's just because KCC are making sure they get everything exactly right and meetings will start again after half-term, with contracts signed in August. We'll then Tupe and the building work will begin. I phoned the KCC BSF office yesterday and they told me that the hold-up was due to making sure the contracts met EU regulations and they could not say what the new schedule would be. I can't see why either of these answers would prevent good-faith meetings to continue with designers, contractors, Northgate etc.. unless something more serious was going on. Neither our head, or the KCC BSF office denied that the preferred bidder was about to be dropped and just repeated what they had said about on-going talks and negotiations, almost like they were working to a script.

Treat this as rumour for now, but I was told this today:

Just a quick update on what's happening here in Kent...... nothing! We have heard nothing from Northgate since the meeting in March and are now just six weeks or so away from TUPEing. I have asked through our SMT what's happening and they are chasing things from their end, but as far as I know they havn't heard from them either. If you're in one of the 11 affected schools and know anything since the March meetings please post here or mail me direct to [email protected] Everything sent personally to me will be treated in strictest confidence.

We use an OWA Exchange email system hosted by our LEA with some users on the OWA and some on a local Outlook installation. Just this morning some of the users using Outlook are seeing an error message as shown in the attached jpg. I'm hoping this is something to do with the hosted service rather than my local servers so does anyone have any suggestions? We're RM CC3.

Yep, that sorted it. Managed to find a copy of Tablet edition XP and built it with the key on the bottom of the tablet. Once I installed all the drivers everything worked fine. My next plan is to replace the hard drive with a fast CF card in an adapted....

Having spent some time googling it looks like you have to build using an Tablet version XP product key or you don't get the tablet features. The key isn't a problem as it's on the tablet, but now I have to find a copy of Tablet XP that it will build with!

yep, tried that, no diff.

Yeah, that's similar. This one is also a RTAB912-T01 and I'm currently trying to get it working after doing a dual-boot CC3 install. The CC3 side works fine but the unmanaged side has no tablet funtions. Gonna try a vanilla Tablet XP install over the weekend. RM have drivers for everything but the digitiser on their website and I'm having trouble finding generic ones.

I'm installing the Tablet PC edition of Windows XP on an old RM Tablet and while it builds just fine I'm getting none of the Tablet functions. No stylus, no front panel buttons. It works just fine if I do a CC3 build but there seems to be some apps and processes running that aren't n vanilla mode. The same devices are present in both builds, and all the drivers seem to be installed. Any suggestions?

The only other issue I have is that it's slow to pick up my network shares. If you go to the web it connects and is up and running in seconds, but if I go to browse available shares on my network it's about two minutes until you can see them. Once they're visible performance is fine and I regularly watch movies that way with no glitches at all.

Hi, yes, I have the 4Gb flash version and it's a really nice bit of kit. I use mine mainly for wifi access to stuff on my home network so didn't need lots of internal storage. You have to pay for a couple of plug-ins for web access etc... which pushes the price up but I love mine. I've had similar devices from MSI and an earlier Archos but the 605 obviously knocks spots off them with decent battery life and touch-screen.

Yep, no problems now, installed the new sata drive chassis and first 500Gb drive for the new storage I wanted to put in too and all is functioning as it should. I hate giving up on a problem like that but sometimes it's just not worth the effort if you know a reinastall will probly sort things out anyway.

Safe mode made no difference so I used this as an excuse to upgrade the machine. Gutted it last night and replaced the Athlon XP2500 with a P4 mobo and chip, doubled the ram to 1Gb and reinstalled with XP Pro. Thanks for trying everyone.

Didn't think of trying safe mode! Will give that a go this evening. I think then I'll just end up reinstalling. It's only a file server and the system is on a seperate drive so I can do it without losing anything. Thanks for all the help.

dmadmin.exe was present and when I ran that command it did it's scan then just closed without reporting anything.

Nothing recent, but then I don't know how long this problem has been present either. It's an XP Media Centre edition install, which I think includes SP2 as standard.

Thanks gecko, but like Michael said that doesn't seem to apply to XP. Michael, have checked all of that and it's all set just as you say. I'm doing it remotely using logmein.com to access the machine from work so I'll double-check when I'm actuallt sitting at the machine but so far the remote access doesn't seem to make any difference. I did notice that while checking what you said if I tried to also look at the dependencies tab it came up with "Win32: Access is denied"?

Had to pop home over lunch. Have managed to log on as "administrator" but am still told that I "do not have access rights to logical disk manager on...". Then the snap-in is blank with "unable to connect to logical disk manager service" accross the bottom. I've stopped and restarted the service but no luck.

Thanks for the tips, will try them this evening.

I have an XP desktop at home that won't allow me to access the logical disk manager under computer/manage, it says I don't have access rights. There's only one user on the machine and it's set to administrator! Any suggestions?

There's no time limit to the protection offered by TUPE.

Surely the idea is to have a balanced argument and let "the average person" make up their own mind?

Shock and horror! The guys from Northgate do NOT have horns and pitch-forks! lol! Ok, just gotten out of a two-hour session with reps from LST (the consortium with the whole BSF contract), Northgate, KCC and those of us TUPEing. There was also the head of IT and the schools business manager. There were presentations from and about LST and Northgate, then an open Q&A session for anything we wanted to ask. The situation is that although Northgate will be paying our wages from the middle of June, nothing much will change for the next year. Their system won't be ready until March '09 so for now we will continue to run our own network, supported by RM, and doing whatever we want. At this stage they are as much fact-finding as we are. They need to learn about us and our network so they can keep continuety of service until the BSF changes happen later. What those changes will be it's too early to tell as they're still deciding if they'll have a base of operations in Kent, or where it will be, what people they have access to in the school already and who'll be willing to roam more if that's what's needed. Generally there were lots of assurances that nothing will be forced upon anyone, but on the other hard there will be oportunities to change what you do and where you do it if that's what you want. They were keen to assure us of the protection afforded us by TUPE and that there was no intention to harmonise us with Northgate T&Cs as there's no such thing, they have basically moved into so many public sector areas and TUPEd so many people that no two contracts are the same. I still have my reservations about BSF in principle but I do have to say that from what I've seen so far they are trying to do it all as painlessly and openly as possible.