flyinghaggis

Nope. We get the same whenever we try to contact them. You only seem to get a rapid response when you enquire about putting through a large sale their way. I guess it's to be expected when they've sales targets to meet but it can be frustrating all the same when you want to buy something smaller like cables/parts as they just dont seem interested.

I think there's issues with video playback in XP with certain video cards on a display when NOT the primary monitor (display 1 in control panel). If you change the display settings to make the Whiteboard/Projector the primary screen this will solve the problem (though obviously it may stop the video playing on the laptop screen!) If there's a clone option on the laptop (usually FN+F5) rather than extend the monitor onto this screen/dualview this might also fix the problem.

I've got the same model connected to my Vista PC home. I installed the XP driver and it worked but seemed to have a habit of disappearing when i restarted my computer. I'm currently using the HP 'generic' Vista Laserjet driver. This works fine for printing text, and survives reboots, but it seems to have 'issues' with certain layouts and images not being printed correctly!

I'd agree with everyone else that a firewire link is the only way to go. If your PCs don’t have firewire cards you can buy them for less than £10 these days. The other options will be probably more expensive (as you'll likely need to buy a vid card with a video input), difficult to configure (as editing software generally expects firewire input) and will result in a loss of quality as the transfer over any kind of video cable will likely be analogue. We use Ulead VideoStudio in our school because of it's functionality and ease of use. Windows Movie Maker itself is pretty good aswell though if you dont need anything too fancy.

I definitely wouldn't use the WinintallLE version on the windows 2000 Server disk. It's designed for Windows 2000 clients and captures lots of settings that will cause serious problems on XP clients. The one on the 2003 Server resource pack is an updated version that is much more compatible with XP (though it's still very limited in what it can do).

AFAIK if you buy your PC's through Dells eduation channels you get UK based support? I always get through to Glasgow whenever I call to arrange for next-day support. I think you may only get this on business laptops (latitude)/desktops (optiplex) though? Can anyone confirm?

We bought ABTutor after evaluating at all of the competion. For the money it's the best combination of functionality and cofigurability we've found. I like the fact that you can lock the software down to individual labs/machines and disable parts of the software you dont want staff to use (such as remote application launching and terminating running apps). The only downside is that the online licence activation connects to their server everytime you run the viewer program which is way too harsh IMO. Still there's nothing to touch it at the price that we've found so far.

We used to clean the lab PC's each summer but our networks grown so large now that it's not really feasible to spend 15 minutes cleaning each PC even just once every couple of months as it would be near enough a full time job. The cleaners don't do it because it's not in their contract though we should probably re-negotiate that as it's to only real solution for keeping the PCs clean. I'm not averse to doing it and will clean a PC if we bring one back for repair ,as other people have said, but it's not possible to go around the entire school doing it pro-actively. If it's a choice of either spending time making sure the PCs are working properly or keeping them clean then the former is always our main priority.

We've just had a request from our history department to http://www.questia.com to get access to all of it's books/journals. It looks pretty good but we're not keen on is the fact that we'd need to set up an individual account for each pupil user as it's got VLE style functionality. There's also a yearly subscription required to access it and historically most of the online subscription resources we've signed up for seem to rarely get used to any good effect. Does anyone know of any other good online library resources that contain books and PDF's they'd recommend for library/study use in schools? TIA

I agree with this in principle but in practice in a school of over 2000 users it's just not possible to keep control of passwords as pupils constantly forget them. It would soak up too much time if we didnt delegate some control to certain lab staff. There's also the possibility that if a member of staff asks us to do a passsword reset it may be that the pupils class is finished before we get a chance to do it if we're out of the office for any reason. This was one of the main reasons we relaxed the policy. We use MMC console's aswell BTW

I especially like the main school pic! An 8Mb resized bitmap! Nice 8)

T-Mobile MDA Vario2 get my vote I was never a fan of smartphones but since I've got my Vario2 (aka HTC Tytn) I couldnt live without it. Combine it with Tmobile's unlimited data tariff for £7.50 a month and you cant go wrong. Given it's relatively small size , 3G, Wifi, Bluetooth, touch-screen, full qwerty keyboard and windows mobile it's an awesome piece of kit. It's the only smartphone so far that I've found genuinely useful. I'd have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone. http://www.coolsmartphone.com/article701.html

The latest Dell Optiplex gx620/745's we've bought all have largely metal chassis's apart from the plastic front panel. Makes then so much ligher than the previous all-plastic models! The real problem for us was that the spec/price meant that HP worked out 20-30% more expensive than Dell which is why we stuck with Dell. We used to order PC's from a local supplier but we found they let standards slip when we started putting through larger orders. One year roughly 10% of the PC's we ordered were DOA because of broken/loose components or things not being plugged in correctly. Obviously they'd never even POST'd the machines to check them once they were built so that meant we stopped ordering from them straight away! We've found the support to be pretty good and in general most of the Dells we've bought have been pretty reliable. The only major issue we had was PSU's failing in one of our models. We mangaged to get 100 of these swapped out in a mass replacement after stamping our feet and threatening to not buy from them again! I reckon that if we'd gone with a smaller company or custom built PC's and tried to organise the same thing we'd have ended up having to buy 100 PSU's replacing them ourselves! Despite all of their faults I don't think there's another company I'd consider buying from (for work at least).

That's strange. Surely with XP the PCs would be more secure and stable so should require less work. When we had RM2.4 / win98 the PC's crashed all the time and the pupils were able to tinker with all of the settings. XP's proved much more reliable. There's no way we could cope with our current ratio (bout 150:1) if we were running Windows '95/'98 8O

Lol, that's where I bought my current PC (barebones system) from just before xmas last year. I'll give them a shout and see if we can get a price. Is there anyone specific you'd recommend speaking to regarding bulk purchases as we're currently looking for specs/quotes for our annual PC refurbishment (100 machines)?

That's a really good price for that spec of PC. Whereabouts did you buy them from at that price if you that if you don't mind me asking?

Really! i thought XP MCE was the home version with a load of bolt-ons but lacked some of the XP Pro functionality? Willing to admit that I could be wrong as I've never tried connnecting it to a domain myself but all of the docs I've read seem to suggest it's no better than XP Home in that regard.

AFAIK Media centre is like Windows XP Home in that you can't log onto a Domain. You'd probably be able to access file shares /etc but I dont think you'd be able to apply group policies properly. I'd expect that any hacks that work around this would probably be illegal unless it's just a minor registry change! Having said that I've never heard of or looked for anything to do this so I'm not sure what's involved it it but it sounds a bit dodgy :?

As far as I'm concerned there's no point in implementing Vista on a network until we get the next version of Windows Server to take advantage of all of the functionality (windows search/etc) offered by the client OS. I can't see any advantage in running Vista with the existing Server OS (2003). We ran 2000 server in conjunction with XP and got burned on several occassions because of incompatabilities between the two OS's because holes/bugs in 2000 server hadn't been patched/updated to take into account windows XP which postdated it. Personally, I wouldnt go with a server release/update unless it's after the desktop OS has been out for a while in future again. I guess RM may not have the luxury of being able to wait for the next server release to implement CC4 which is probably why they're hands' been forced to press on with CC4 ahead of time using Vista/2003 Server.

Cheers for the advice. I've had a couple of other folk recommend this card so we'll get one in to see if the music staff are happy with it. Just to add I've checked and we're currently running Cubase SX 2.0 (NOT SX3) on the network.

Yes, They're running on a domain with the pupils/staff locked down with only basic permissions/ standard non-admin user accounts and it all works fine. The only real problem we've encounteed is that we've had to manually install the Cubase software as it comes with drivers for the hardware dongle to allow the software to run. Bit of a headache but it wasn't too bad as it's only a dozen PC's.

We're running Cubase SX3 on our music PC's. We've been struggling to decide what's best with regard to sounds cards though we're pretty happy that pretty much any modern PC (=>P4,>512MB RAM ,etc)seems capable of running the software. The main trick seems to be getting the correct sound card and that's where we've been running into problems. We've tried soundblaster 1024!live cards which aren't support by ASIO for all and as a result have really bad latency. The Terratec Aureon 7.1 Universe card on the teachers PC works really well and has native ASIO drivers but costs >£100 and seems like overkill. I've tried buying a cheaper £25 Aureon 5.1 Fun card and whilst this works OK with ASIO4ALL there's still a slight latecy as it still doesn't come with a dedicated option you get with the Aureon 7.1. I think the main problem is that I dont know much when it comes to MIDI/music editing and neither does our music department so we're struggling to get to grips with the exact hardware we need for what they want to do. I don't think they're very sure exactly what they'll be using the software for either which complicates things further! We've got a lab of 12 computers fitted with Soundblaster!Live1024 cards that we've pretty much given up on trying to get to work with Cubase so we're looking into buying a dozen new soundcards. Can anyone recommend a suitable reasonably priced sound card with dedicated ASIO drivers/MIDI interface? Or should we just bit the bullet and purchase more expensive audio cards?

We've actually using the exact same setup! The main problems we found was that VNCon wasn't suitable for staff because they didn't like the interface and found it difficult to use. Cycling through screens, doesn't always show username's, etc. It also has a habit of crashing quite frequently at the client/viewer side when viewing a lot of computers at the same time. That's why we've been looking at getting ABTutor which works really well. The only thing against it is that some of the onlince licenising activation is a bit draconian! Cant believe you have to register each workstation it's installed on with a hardware key.

I'd guess the primary reason is probably because if we all bought hydrogen/electric powered cars the government wouldn't be able to guilt trip us into paying such extortionate levels of tax on fuel. As people have said the government wants to decrease the use of fossil fuels but at the same time they dont want to lose the amount of tax it generates. I expect some of the large oil companies are doing some pretty serious lobbying to slow down any incentive for a move to alternative fuels. If I put my cynic cap on (I tend to wear it most of the time!) I suspect the reason for these per mile (sat-nav) road tax plans are because they know the days of fossil fuels and crazy fuel tax levels are limited and that's the reason they want to charge a per-mile road tax. Because lets face it, all they have to do is increase the duty tax on fuel and that just as effective a per-mile form of road tax as fitting sat-nav to everyone's car! So why go to all the hassle of trialing tracking device based systems unless you have another reason for it?

I said no aswell but I think there's still a stand-alone PC connected to an envelope printer somewhere as they never go 2000/XP compatible drivers for it and a couple of stand-alones in science used for data logging. I'll bet it's the same case in another 10 years with windows XP! Takes ages to fully phase out an OS :?