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Epson X-11 for me. I love the horizontal keystone feature, great if you have to replace an old centre lens projector and don't want to move the mount.

That is interesting, the staff member responsible for our census reported SIMS as being slow, nobody else did. I will check to see what she was doing at the time and see if it was related.

We had a similar problem. Eventually we got the cash for a Yamaha Stagepas 500. For us the advantage was the amp packs into a speaker and the cables into the other, that and a 'suitcase' on wheels. All in all a good investment and very easy to transport around the building.

I've just got the primary we support to send their 3650 48 port poe switch off to these folks Lifetime Repairs, Spares & Support - Comtek Network Systems (UK). It looks like it was damaged by a power surge last week which also took out some traffic lights. They claim £280+vat +£15 carriage for a fixed price repair and no charge if not repairable. I'll post back as soon as I know the outcome.

Glad to see someone else is using OTRS. I haven't started using AD authentication yet, but it is on the 'I should look at that'. Anyway, have you looked at the documentation on the OTRS site. Customer user backend This also looked interesting Configuring OTRS to make Customers / Users authenticate via LDAP (MS Windows Active Directory)

According to STRUCTURED WIRING - RJ45 - BALUM - POT ADAPTOR - CAT5 you should use pins 4 & 5.

With Exchange 2010 does that stop them from expanding the group and then sending to the list anyway as a list of individuals? Some of our folks worked that out quite quickly as a method of getting round the restrictions.

I started using Muppet characters for machine names. I skipped Miss Piggy just in case it took on her trait of hitting back!

Amongst giving similar tips out I also give this out to staff to help them avoid the pitfalls of sending emails to the wrong people. http://www.securingthehuman.org/newsletters/ouch/issues/OUCH-201203_en.pdf The guides are written by experts for ordinary folk to help themselves and computer safe. So far they have gone down well and nobody felt I insulted them (a typical problem with some!).

As Andrew_C says the Sennheiser UHF mics are good value. Some years ago when I looked after a church sound system we had awful problems with VHF mics, I then replaced them with UHF and never had a problem again. I will only get UHF mics from now on due to all the problems I used to have.

Nova-T4 is still there, I just created a short cut to it from Program Files\Sims\Sims.net. I don't know (from memory) if there are plans to completely remove it, but as far as I know it is no longer supported.

An RCD effectively measures the current in the live and neutral of the supply and if they differ by more than the rating of the RCD then it trips. RCD's ratings are in milli Amps (mA) rather than Amps. I've seen several causes to the trips being a little keen: The trip is aging and is tripping at a lower level than the rating. The devices plugged are heavily filtering the mains. The mains is 'dirty' and the filters in the supplies are just doing their job to keep the devices safe. The cure is to get the electricians back in to test the RCD is at its specification and all the devices plugged in do not have leaky PSU's. If these show up as good then it is possible to get a monitor installed to check to see what condition the mains is in, does the supply voltage vary, does it have any spikes, etc. If all else fails it may be necessary to replace the RCD with one with a slightly higher rating simply because you have too many devices filtering just a little too much when combined together.

I spotted that a while ago, more by accident than research. We have several identical laptops we use for presentations, consistently one was quiet, and then I realised it had a two pin mains lead. That said I am very tempted by the Hd400 to silence the buzz from visiting speakers laptops, where we can't change the PSU.

We started using something similar to the KPMS recoiler. Ours came from Loxit.com and cost less than £10. They don't seem to show on the website but when I was looking called them to see what they could suggest. That said an ex-collegue came up with something costing £4 which I will post here when I know where to get them from. A teather is not very secure but it does stop them being 'borrowed' by staff.

We have the same machines and found that with newer drivers (not quite the latest at the moment) WOL works find after you set it. Our problem is getting the WOL settings to be enabled after SysPrep in XP. I really must try the latest drivers to see if there is an option to set it at install time, I seem to remember that being their is a different Intel LAN driver.

As the others have said check the disk queue length for the database drive. We had a similar issue and it was caused by the OS, database & logfiles all being on the same disk spindles. In their infinite wisdom a predecessor (or LEA) put the database on the D: drive, which was just a partition on the RAID5 containing the OS. The disk queue length was huge when checked. I rebuilt it last summer on our new virtual server platform with the database on the SAN now and working very well. We tried the SIMS diagnostics on the old server and it would take 30-40 minutes, now it takes less than 2. Something else we did with FMS rather than SIMS. Detattach and reattach the database was the advice from Capita and it worked! We also found the rebuild indexes patch helped a little. However these were only a sticking plaster on the real problem of the server being badly set up in the first place. As an aside I am planning on getting a t-shirt made with something like "it wasn't my fault, I wasn't here when that was bought." written on it as I seem to be saying it lot at the moment. The only problem is that we are changing so much that soon it will all be my fault!

I did this Monday, so I will take look tomorrow. We do have a Lion Server which we use to manage the clients. From memory I joined the Mac to AD and then used directory utility and went to the advanced settings for AD and removed the tick on 'force local home drive'. I have also upgraded the client to 10.7.4, whether that is important I couldn't say.

Also done.

We had a demo a few weeks ago and I am sure we were told that you can use any headphone / microphone on a standard sound card, and the minimum requirements state a PC headset whilst recommending the Sanako ones (Sanako UK / Products / Sanako Study 1200). However they did suggest and I think I would agree to some extent that their headsets were more robust than most. We currently have a Lab 300 and have had little problem with the headsets themselves, the worst we have had is the kids pulling the earpads off. The cables are a different story, the original RJ11 cables are very poor and quite expensive. The new USB ones are more expensive, but as we have not used them know if they are more reliable.

OTRS (IT Service Management Software - Free Open Source Help Desk - Problem Management System - Customer Interaction Software | OTRS). Very powerful open source helpdesk which can be configured to be ITIL compliant with incident management, problem management, service and configuration management and change request management. Sends and receives emails or a web interface.

We are looking as the Sanako 1200 for the summer. My biggest concern is the same as yours @gavtow. Did you put the main Sanako lab into a VLAN or doesn't it need it?

I guess it depends on how much data and how many servers. In my previous school that was as much as possible Linux based servers we used Amanda ( Amanda Network Backup: Open Source Backup for Linux, Windows, UNIX and OS X).

I would also go with Epson EB-X11. However it depends who is ceiling mounting the projector. You may find the overall cost including the installation is similar if you went with an Epson EB-470 ultra short throw. I am told by my installer that putting them up is easy and being wall mounted the cable runs are shorter, so cheaper, mains power is on the wall so may be cheaper. I believe the wall bracket is included so no additional costs for that.

Trying to get the kids to bed at their Grandparents, always hard work on the first night.

Yesterda we spent a very wet morning walking the 6 mile round trip, waiting for an hour at Tatton Park for the few minutes of seeing the torch. Despite it being cold and wet and teaching staff not bothering to keep order (leaving it to the TA's and other support staff) it was a good day. Topped off by an ex-student who ran with the torch today bringing it in to school, he kindly posed for pictures and allowed several of us to hold it.