HTCPCP

Stone and VeryPC can't be that bad considering they have a lot of very happy customers who keep coming back. Got an old (and I mean old - I think it has an XP SP1 sticker on it) Stone PC running some software in one of my schools, and really can't fault it. I always consider both of those companies when looking at machines, and always had great service!

For year 1 and 2, they take the trolley, but years 3-6 all carry the laptops without any issues! I've had 1 bounced laptop in over 2 years in a school where they have 48 student laptops (and for a few months they had 64 laptops) and that was a kid tripping over something left on the floor in the hall...

At uni we named our wifi in first year to THE GAME, and upstairs named theirs originally as Bastards, then changed it to 'we just lost it', and at home after the death of our original wifi router Marvin, we now have 'Marvin Mk2' and 'The Paranoid Android' under the second SSID.

Have you thought about moving up to full sized laptops at all? I bought 16 Lenovo B590s earlier in the year for one of my primaries, and really can't fault them! Reliable, well built and not a single problem (and for about £350 each too). All depends on what you want to use them for really, as for certain activities, we now have ipads and Galaxy Tab IIs to go along with the laptops which covers the more portable side of things.

We have just started to go down the iBoard Touch route... Just don't let anyone not on the ground floor have them unless you have a lift (we do, but weren't allowed to use it so had to struggle up the stairs with them)! They aren't the lightest device in the world....

we just use normal netbook charging stackers here. Unless you need to move them around, then they are far better at charging the units

We have 3 different build disks which we use. One uses the Atheros AR8151 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller version 2.0.4.4, another has 2 different Realtek ones (Realtek PCI GBE Family Controller 6.249.621.2011 and 2 Realtek PCIe GBE family Controller version 5.790.824.2011). Where about in the build do you get to before it falls over? Is it just not picking up the IP address?

We use PRM too, however it can be rather annoying now they have increased their limit. Free mugs are brilliant, even if they do keep disappearing from our office...

One of my colleagues had a huge number of issues finding the right driver for the HP devices. Have you tried all of the drivers on one build? I know it can be a bit of a pain, but eventually it worked for him. @Matty94 that message is just telling you what the device is, Ven_8086 is Intel, and the Dev_153A is the Intel® Ethernet Connection I217-LM

All geographically VLaned here too. The only non geographical Vlanning is the Wifi, Servers, Cameras and printers which are site wide. Really glad we went down that route, managed to use it as an excuse to get the governors to fund a new core switch, some new cabling and replace the older switches around the school! Was a bit of a hassle to set up, partly down to us not paying enough attention when we were plugging in the workstations in one of our switches which caused a loop in the system.

We got caught by EMC, they want 880 euros for 1 hard drive, and with the rest of the associated costs, they quoted us £2500 all in! They really have lost the plot over there! All because the company we had bought it through set us up with the wrong device so we never received the end of support contract notification! We aren't going EMC again for a SAN Array (shame we bought a new second SAN last year from them really...)

When HP tried that trick on us (warranty replaced printer) that left us with a load of unusable toners, I kept ringing them until they came and collected and replaced them with new toners that work. Not bought a HP printer since, gone to Kyocera for that. As for base, we have a load of MFPs where we order toners when our stock runs low (below 2 spares) and if the MD is free and sees that we have put in an order for toners he pops over to see us for a cuppa!

Not used VeryPC before, but been in contact with them, and really can't fault them! Really competitive price, very friendly and proactive too!

we charge departments 2ppp mono and 8ppp colour, with a 0.1ppp discount for duplexing (so a 2 page document duplex is 3.8p). That covers the whole lot including paper and lease of the machines.

I have a load of the B590s across 3 schools bought through UK Zones. They worked out cheaper adn are nearly identical as far as I can tell. I do have a B5400 i5 laptop and it's rather nice. However just to warn you, like most laptops nowadays, they do come with a load of bloatware and don't come with Adobe reader installed, but pdf software you have to buy...

I always feel that Volvo's have moved away from their heritage of massive cars that are built like tanks and will easily do 3 times round the clock! However for an estate they do look fantastic! @elsiegee40, have you thought about the VW Passat estate? My parents went for one of them after their previous work horse died 10 years ago (3 year old former company car with 80k miles on the clock) for not much over 7 grand and they can't fault it. Took all our stuff when we moved/went to uni/were cleaning out one of my Great Aunties house etc Still going strong having been booked into it's next service and it's 4th cambelt!

wow, where do schools find teachers? It must be something they spray into classrooms or something...

It is a lot easier to get if you share an office with the servers, as you can argue that they are potentially damaging the servers... That really makes the SLT/governors worry. They don't seem to care about staff as much as the cost of equipment

If i'm at one of my primary schools, smart shoes, black trousers and a grey branded polo. If im in the office, it's meant to be a suit and tie, but not warn a tie for 2 years at work - and it lead to the fight when we stopped wearing them in the office, after they kept getting in the way. The SLT finally agreed that it was probably a health and safety risk and let us not wear them. Summer it's whatever we want to wear, as long as it's suitable for the work you are doing (i.e. not high heels if you aren't going to be behind the desk for the whole day etc)

TMOs have been used in rugby to great success. As have citing officers. I think both should be adopted by football, and suddenly all the players on the floor diving everywhere and otherwise trying it on get punished too!

One of my schools have an IT suite full of RM Ones from 2013, and there have been 2 problems, both of them warranty fixes next day. Only downside is, when they get moved around a lot, even with the cable lock on, power can be pulled out and its a bit of a hassle to get into them to put them back in. The school like the smaller footprint, that they can put the keyboard and mouse on top of the machine, and that they are adjustable too. They are now looking at replacing some of their older machines with AIOs too, albeit looking more likely to be the Lenovo ones.

I think the message from Microsoft is - "hmmmm this new Metro look and moving to more and more annoying software isn't working. Let's go for the annoying ads to see if that will make people give us more money...

When one of our machines dropped off DNS, we opened up CMD through "run as administrator" on the client. That worked for us so we didn't have to worry about going any further down that road.

The ones we get have i3 processors, a 320gb hard drive (usually WD Blue), a gigabyte or Asus motherboard, a cheap DVD drive (they are still going to get broken by a kid at some point, no matter how well built!), a stick of branded value range RAM and a cheap PSU. All the machines that have developed faults tend to be either a stick of ram failing or the PSU failing. If I was buying parts, the only thing I would have increased was the PSU and get a branded not a cheap value one. If you buy cheap, then you can't really moan if the service isn't as good as you expect.

Fantastic news! Well done.