flyinghaggis

As above we've found digital MP3 dictaphones were a better solution than trying to attach mics to PCs. Our language dept use the ones below thoughyou may want to buy something a bit better if it's for exams. TTS - Easi-Speak

What kind of price does a 300Gb SAS drive come in at these days? I've not looked at benckmarks but from seeing the performance of the (mirrored - RAID 1)SAS drives in our blade servers it looks like they'd be substantially quicker than a SATA drive. Would be interesting to see how they compare with solid state in terms of boot times/etc?

I'd have suggested trying one of those timer plugs so it would kill power at certain times of day (say 5pm until 7am). The problem is that the projectors ideally need the fan to contuinie running to cool down the bulb after it's been turned off for 5 minutes so it would probably do more harm than good. I agree though it's quite frustrating especially when staff leave them on over the weekend and you start working out how much those 60 hours of wasted run-time cost. As other have suggested you need to attribute printer/bulb running costs to each department and not central IT expenditure.

I'd tend to agree but I've been finding the problem with HP support is you just end up getting put through to someone reading from a flowchart who's only resolution is to send a replacement printer with the same fault (in terms of our problems with P2055s). So far we've had no success speaking to anyone who can suggest anything more technical than simply holding the buttons on the printer to perform a factory reset. Unlike Dell/etc we don't have any kind of account manager who can take up the issue on our behalf. The compaines who we usually buy HP kit, and our account manager there, dont seem interested in dealing with the problem. At the end of the day it'll be their loss as we simply wont buy anymore HP kit in future. Are there any formal steps you can go through, or that anyone has had success with, in approaching HP to formally complain about hardware issues?

We've already done it but cheers for the advice! That's frustrating but at least it's fixable. The dead formatter boards and P2055 NICs dying completely are much more serious issues as at the moment since there's no work around for the former and a dead formatter board means basically buying a new printer. All the more frustrating that, from reading this message board and others, they're widespread faults which HP wont acknowledge and are unable to fix Not sure about Brother as we've bought their printers previously but moved away from them as we weren't keen on the separate toner/drum setup. In my experience it wastes a lot of time troubleshooting as you never know whether or not it's the toner/drum that's faulty and often staff throw away a perfectly good toner cart before the drum is replaced negating any cost saving from having separate drums/toner. Their drivers have proved to be a bit hit and miss when it comes to correctly rendering some types of print jobs sent to them too. We also had one specific model from them where the laser appeared to fail on every type of one model Brother HL-5170 or HL-5070 IIRC we purchased causing the print to become too faint and rendering the printers unusable after a couple of years (outside warranty). That was actually what prompted us to switch to HP! Maybe the solution, as others have suggested, is just to make a point of buying printers with extended warranties as without it you just seem to end up getting grief from management when they all start dying after a couple of years. Is it really asking too much to just have a printer brand that simply works without having models that all fail due to the same design fault 2-3 years down the line?

2 of our 6 P3005N's have failed inside a year with this fault. All our P2055DN's ramdonly drop of the network requiring a restart every day to get them working again. See thread below :- http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/36047-hp-laserjet-p2055dns-going-offline-not-responding-5.html The P2015's before that used to randomly loose their IP address settings! I'm literally at the point where I'm contemplating never buying another HP printer again because their quality control department appears to have gone completely out to lunch! HP Printers these days appear to be absolute junk Anyone recommend any alternatives?

Our music department primarily use a website called Naxos Music Library Naxos Music Library - Invaluable Resource for Music Enthusiasts and Collectors It's more geared for folk/classical music so doesn't contain a lot of well known contempary music though so may not be suitable depending on your requirements. You'll find most of the well known music download/streaming sites aren't usable in school because their EULA's only permit personal (itunes/we7/spotify/etc). AFAIK there is no legal way to 'rip' a retail purchased CD onto the school's public network without breaking copyright so playing back the original CD directly is the only option. Would love to hear someone tell me I'm wrong about this though!

Agreed, if your budget can stretch to £400 then an i5-750 is the best option. The new Core i3 might also be another possibility as you could get a mobo,ram and that processor for around about £250 As an aside I'd be surprised if you could upgrade from a Pentium to a Core2Duo chip and still keep the same motherboard? IIRC correctly the socket's are the same so it would physically fit but the voltages are different so it won't actually work? If you can as others have suggested mayble looking at something like a Core2quad Q9400 might be the best bang-per-buck option.

Does seem likely it's something on our network but the timings of it seems so random so I've so far been unable to track it down to a specific setting/device. As mentioned it doesn't affect any of the other 60 printers on our network? The other weird things is that the firmware updates do make a differnce to the frequency of it happening. Some firmware revisions seem to make the printers die every few our whereas others might last a day or so but ultimately they all fail at least once every 48 hours. I'm pretty sure we have Spanning tree protocol enabled on all our switches incidentally. Was there a specific reason you thought that might be causing the issue?

In an ideal world we would but at the time we migrated to Windows XP virtually all our software was Windows 98 based and simply wouldn't run without doctoring permissions. Software that had it's own (or used the old windows 3.11 file manager) was in the minority so wasn't such a problem to refuse a couplf of apps but if we'd turned down every app that required write permissions at the time we wouldnt have had any software on our network apart from MS office! We're moving to Windows 7 soon which is inherently better able to deal with old programs that write to locations they shouldn't as it can redirect it on the fly. That plus App-V should mean we don't have to make compromises with file permisions again in future.

I'll bet there isnt a school computer in the whole country that doesnt have several files/folders in "programs files" and the "windows" folder set to read/write for all users to get around limitations of old outdated software. We've refused programs that allow pupils to browse the C drive freely before as it means they could potentially trash specific programs for other pupils. They could also amend ini files/etc to redirect stuff when programs are run/etc. Plus it allows pupils to copy the entire contents of a local PCs hard drive onto a memory stick/etc so they could effectively steal all your software!

Personally if I had to choose a phone available at the moment I would say an Iphone 3GS But... It's gonna be a busy year for mobile phones what with the iPhone 4G, Nexus One(Android OS) and Windows Phone OS 7 all just about the hit the market (Summer/Autumn) I personally would hang onto you current handset until they're out and you can make a choice then cause whatever you pick now you'll probaby be stuck with for the next 2 years!

The ironic thing is that most of the £200 designer frames now seem to be styled on NHS glasses from the 1980's The Tesco value ones would probably look more expensive to anyone not in the know! http://www.thelineofbestfit.com/wp-content/images/2008/09/jarvis_cocker_001.jpg Jarvis knows the difference though

Tell me about it. Glasses, contact lenses, prescription sunglasses, prescription swimming goggles. It's an expensive business being blind!

Me too. Much more convenient when you can just chuck in a pair of one-day disposable ones and forget about the fact you're even wearing them. Probably costing about £200 a year but you can quite easily spend that on a nice pair of glasses which you could lose/break in less time.

Asda - 2 for £90 The glasses themselves were OK but I had to go back with them 3 times before I got the fit quite right on both pairs. If I wore them all the time (usually use contact lenses) I think I'd probably have spent a bit more though. It might just be the shape of the lenses or the way they're sitting (or possibly just in my mind!) but I would say they don't seem quite as 'uniform' and up to the same level of quality when looking through them as the last pair I bought from my local optician? They were about a quarter of the price so maybe you only get what you pay for at the end of the day.

Wouldn't a single 5870 or 5900 be a better option than 2x5850's? I've not checked recently but from my experiece it's almost always better to buy a single faster card than combining 2 slower ones? I'm also tempted by an SSD but for what I'd want to spend all I can get is a 64-80Gb drive which really isn't big enough as a windows/programs partition as far as Im concerned. Maybe when they start offering 256Mb drives for around £200 i might re-consider. If I had to make a call between spending the cash on an SSD or graphics i'd probably go for a video card. Or better yet why not just buy a single HDD, a single video card and save the £200-300 you would have spend on and SSD/2nd vid card for upgrades next year? Tempted by a new PC myself but there's always something shinier just about to be released! At the moment it's Fermi that's stopping me upgrading but I'l sure there'll probably be something else next month (Gulftown ,SSD, 3D monitor, touchscreen, list goes on!) aswell EDIT: Just noticed you reply and that you've pretty much done what i'd suggested anyway!

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9F4QJK1wFs&feature=player_embedded]YouTube- Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Screenshots and Live Demo Video Walkthrough Preview[/ame] Another phone OS 7 video walkthrough

Looks like this game's never gonna get released in the UK so wondered if anyone had any recommendations for where to order reasonably priced US import games from? Has anyone bought demon's souls by the way?

Hmm, can't say for sure if it's the formatter boards at fault. All I know is that when it's connected to our main network they seem to stop responding at least once a day requiring a reset to fix. So far they've only failed to respond when connected to our main network and haven't had the same issue when connected via USB or on a stand-alone mini-switch with just a laptop connected. When the printers stop responding (to ping) you can still use the controls on the printer so the issue would seem to lie with the onboard embedded jetdirect network card. I'd assume this is on the printer's main formatter board aswell though ? Obviously this does point to it being somekind of traffic on our network that's causing these printers to fail. Mind you on the mini-switch only a single laptop was connected so it might be volume of traffic rather than a single packet which causes the fault. At the end of the day this problem only affects P2055s and none of the other dozen models (including many other HPs) so I'd think it unfair if HP simply blamed our network setup. We've been in contact with HP but so far all they've done is to send us 2 replacement printers both of which have had the same fault We've already spent weeks tweaking the settigns on the original model (disabling protocols,enabling firewalls, and even just leaving it on the network without any print queue being assigned to it) so I'm not keen to spend time re-testing with this one unless HP volunteer that they've a possible fix for the issue! Will post an update if HP offer us any updated firmware/etc but so far no success!

http://bostonist.com/attachments/austinist_kerry/pirate-cat.jpg

QFT+1 Ironically if you'd pirated the movie they'd probably have cut out the anti-piracy warning so you'll only ever see it on genuine's DVD's you've paid to watch

It's all about the pentiums Anyone remember this

Nice Setup! Quick question about the 5800 series if you dont mind as tempted by a 5850. In terms of triple monitor out does it work spanning the desktop across 3 displays of different sizes? I've currently got 2 x 20" widescreen monitors (1680x1050) and plan on buying a new 24" monitor (1920x1200) to use as the main centre desktop with one of my exisitng monitors at either side. I'm not too interested in playing games using eyefinity but primarily wanted to use it as a triple monitor out for productivity. The main thing I want to make sure of is that I can use the 24" monitor as the centre monitor (with the start menu/task bar on it)? All of the demo's I've seen of triple-out are for eyefinity and have the start menu on the left most screen which I definitely dont want. Can you move the 'primary monitor' to the middle screen and 'position' the other monitors at each side? Will the above setup work OK and/or are there any other 'gotchas' I need to be aware of? [i realise I need to make sure the new monitor has a display port input] Any tips would be appeciated TIA

Just say this today. Some impressive looking stuff!