flyinghaggis

The last FF online past me by but I reckon I'll give this one a try! What format are you guys planning on getting it on? PS3 or PC?

I guess yourself, and anyone who's just bought one, should be able to break the contract within the first 14 days and return the phone if it's that bad. The thing I don't get is that they're saying it only affects left-handed people but everyone who' right-handed holds the phone in their left-hand so this bug's going to affect 90% of buyers. It would have been less of an issue if holding it in you're right hand caused the signal loss! Mind you, if nail polish or a 'bumper' case can fix the issue it doesn't sound like Apple will have too big a deal resolving the fault. Suspect it'll mainly come down to whether they're willing to publicly awknowledge the flaw and do something for existing owners beyond than telling them they're not holding it properly! Think I'll move across to the 30-day Simplicity contract and hold-fire to see what Apple come back with in the next couple of weeks. I can imagine Jobs and co. will be sitting around a table in a smoke filled room discussing their options at the moment given the potential PR fallout from this http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e60/penfish4/iphone.jpg

So what's the general impression from iphone4 owners regarding this problem? Has anyone had any dropped calls because of it. Does it literally drop the connection altogether when it happens or is it just a case of signal quality dropping by a bar (as sometimes happens when i pick up my iphone3g TBH?). I'm quite tempted by the new iphone4 but the reports of this bug are putting me off! Is it as potentiallly serious as some news sites are making it out to be or are they exagerating the fault ?

That's the main problem isn't it. Public sector* pay freeze *Note : does not apply equally to all public sector workers! (edit: I suspect)

Two things that spring to mind are trying to enable 'hibernate' so the PC's can start up quicky (though it's not without it's side-effects). Looking at options for Wake-on-LAN (assuming your PCs support it) might also be useful as that way you could potentially turn on PCs in the morning and power them down (using a script) automatically at the end of the day thus eliminating start-up times altogether. 3 mins 30 secs plus a further minute to load outlook does seem a bit on the slow side but it entirely depends on your hardware spec and what software your running. When logging on performance of the server/network bandwidth will all have an impact aswell.

Ever since the "banking crisis" I've wondered exactly how the situation could arise where banks lend more money that they could ever actually cover and can nearly bring down the entire financial system because of it. Now I know though to be honest the reality is so scary I almost wish I didnt !

Everytime we've phoned HP with a faulty out-of-warranty P3005 they're replaced it quibble free so far? I agree though the quality of HP printers does seem to have taken a slide recently. That's about 50% of our P3005s failed within 2 years due to formatter board issues and our P2055s keep dropping off the network requiring a power reset to get them working again. We've sent HP a wireshark trace to see if that turns up anything but so far haven't heard back..... We actually used to buy Brothers but found that their drivers were a bit less reliable and had a tendancy to render jobs incorrectly. That and I'm not convinced by the seperate drum/toner cartridge as it seems to make the print quality worse and resulted in a lot of staff throwing out good toner carts because the drum has gone (thereby negating the cost savings of a seperate drum).

Do you have to specifically ask for the 5 year warranty as I've never seen the option of it for desktops on Dell's website? How much extra is the cost compared to 3 year warranty per PC if you don't mind me asking?

Really?, we're found that our 3-year support package, for desktop PCs at any rate, is pretty good IMO. Next day on site replacement for any hardware faults and UK based called centres for business/educational customers. That and the pricing is still on average £100-200 cheaper per unit than HP. Can't ever imaging being tempted to pay the extra for HP to be honest. Admittedly Dells educational account managers seem to be a bit patcy and have a habit of not responding very quickly to your calls when you do have a larger fault/issue than the helpdesk can deal with. Since we've started going through other resellers, rather than Dell direct, the service has been a lot better.

Don't know if there's an easy way within the console to authorise an app that's actually been detected specifically as a virus (as opposed to a potentially unwanted app)? We've put an exclusion path into the on-access scanning for now until we hear back from Sophos.

We've just noticed this moring that Sophos has started detecting part of the ActivBoard software as a virus-infected file. See below for details :- File "C:\Program Files\Activ Software\ActivstudioPE3\ACTIVcalc.exe" belongs to virus/spyware 'Mal/VBCrypt-C' We've contacted Sophos regarding the problem and are wait to hear back from them. This might well be the end of the road for Sophos in our school!

I used to get them quite frequently but haven't been bothered with them for years thankfully. Dont know if it's maybe old age or possibly something that's changed. THey were horrible things too. I'd literally have a pounding headache which would get worse through the day and would eventually end up feeling nauseus then sick. I couldn't even take anything to relieve the pain as I couldn't keep anything down. All I could do was to head off too bed and try and get some sleep after which I'd geneally feel better. Problem is it would wipe me out the next day aswell since it meant going an entire day without food and typically very little sleep. One thing I think that's helped, though it might just be coincidence, is the move away from CRT's to TFT monitors. I personally find them much easier on the eyes. Don't know if it's to do with the way the screen refreshes, or the non-reflective matte finish on most TFT's, but whatever the reason I've certianly found it's helped me a lot and I've not suffered from them at all since changing to TFTs everywhere.

It is expensive but then again when you consider it's a neat all-in-one solution to be able to record 2 weeks worth of 6 channels, edit/store them indefinitely and play them back on any PC throughout the entire school the price tag isn't too bad IMO. Especially when you conisder that iplayer only lets you watch programs for a couple of weeks and educational videos/DVDs tend to be very expensive to buy aswell. Worth mentioning that our teaching staff really like it aswell!

Don't think I can anwser that without starting a flame war by my personal experience is that ATI's drivers are unstable and runreliable so have always preferred NVidia TBH. My choice of video card was either going to be a GTX 470 (£280) or a HD5850 (£240) and I felt happier paying the extra £40 for the Nvidia card. In pretty much every benchmark the 470 is quicker than the 5850 aswell.

I built the PC myself. All in (given I already had a few of the parts case/psu/monitors/speakers) it cost about £1000 for the rest. I did consider buying one pre-built but it was going to cost about £400 more at most places for the spec I wanted. Bought all of the parts from Scan but most of the other usual suspects (overclockers,novatech,etc) are fairly similar with their pricing.

The i7-920 is currently on sale for £170 vs the £230 the i7-930 costs. The only difference between them is literally that the 930 is has a slightly higher clock multiplier and runs at 2.8ghz (compared to the 2.6 of the 920).

I actually installed it on a single Samsung SSD 1TB HDD before I got the Intel and felt like the HDD was holding the system back to be honest. I thought about striping the 2 F3 1Tb drives but in the end decided to go for the SSD instead. It certainly doesn't feel any slower to write than a HDD and the read speed must be a least twice as quick as the HDD. Windows now boots in about half the time. One second and I'll try a file copy to test the write speed. Edit: It's tricky to tell from the windows file copy. I'd probably need a benchmark to find out exactly but in terms of time to install Windows it certianly didnt feel any slower copying files than the HDD though to be honest the DVD is probably the bottleneck in the Windows install. In general use I've yet to find a scenario where the HDD felt quicker.

After buying an upgraded video card last week and finding it didn't really make the expected difference in my games I've decided to go the whole hog an build an entirely new PC! Specs as follows :- Intel i7-920 CPU 6GB Crucial Ballistix 1600 DDR3 Tracer (with LEDs!) Asus P6X58D-E Motherboard Nvidia GTX 470 Video Card Intel X-25M 80Gb SSD 2 x Samsung F3 1Tb HDD Coolermaster HAF 922 Case Corsair 650Watt Tx PSU 20" Dell Ultrasharp 2007WFP + 20" Dell Ultrasharp 2009WFP Logitech X-540 Speaker System Just finished getting it intalled and setup today. The differece between it and my old E6600 /8800GT is certainly noticeable. I'd say it's now about 3-4 times as quick as my old rig in terms of FPS and most benchmarks! Gonna order myself a slightly larger monitor next week possibly funds permitting Happy Times

Yes, I think you could do that. TBH i'd try and push for a new server if possible for the install though to minimise any risk by moving them to a temporary server which is only capable of running exchange as a temporary hop . Would also save a lot of pain migrating mailboxes back and forth as it'll effectively doubling your workload and downtime for staff. See below for more info :- Exchange Server 2007: Exchange 2007 Help

There are some good articles on the technet website for how to do this but the jist of what you need to do is :- 1) Build a new server and install Exchange 2007 on it 2) Migrate the mailboxes from the old one over to the new one 3) Decomission the old one

We've bought optiplex's (GX620's,745ss and 755's) with the same design of Mini-Tower case as the 380's and never had any issues. In fact they're wonderfully designed cases IMO (toolless,easy to work on) and BTX fan layout makes them whisper quiet. Only downsides are that becase of the BTX design and OEM nature of the parts (PSU,mobo,etc) it makes buying replacement parts a bit tricky (not a big issue IMO as they come with 3 year warranty). Suspect the HP would be in the same boat with that though. We've never had any issues with the kids managing to push through the front panels either.

"Becta, the education IT procurement quango, is to be scrapped as part of the new government's £6.2bn cuts this year, announced by George Osborne this morning." School IT quango to be expelled

We've actually never had many issues with our P2015's (we have about 7-8 of them) other than the occasional one losing it's IP address every month or two (which can be resolved by added a reservation in DHCP) With regards to 'cooking' PCB's to "fix" issues I think I'll give that a miss! Even if it does solve the problem temporarily it's almost certianly going to fail again with the same issue !

The one I've just patched shows the code : Firmware Version: V.37.12.IR6498 We've ordered different batches and the same model of P2055 at different times (the newer P2055s seem to have gigabit ethernet in place of 100mb) but all have the same issue unforutnately.

Nope, still drops off the network after a random amount of time even with the latest failware