JamesDonkin

If your machine tests earth continuity at less than 200mA then yes, allegedly you can. Speaking to the trainer and other people who do PAT testing they won't go anywhere near a PC with a testing machine as they know that this fries PCs and they'll need to pay for it. Seeing as though its me responsible for fixing it, I'm not going to risk breaking it. The article you link says IT equipment. This includes more than just PCs. Do you do your PAT testing?

I didn't think HSE had anything to do with it. It's the IEEE book I work form. PCs don't need physically testing at all as they can be damaged by it. A formal visual inspection every year is recommended though.

I do. I agreed to do it when I was new, eager to please and never realised what was involved. It takes about a week and a half to two weeks of the summer holidays which impacts on my primary responsibilities. If its a small school it might not be so bad, but if you're in a big school remember this will take ages, especially on your own. Your course probably won't cover radiation leakage from microwaves which also needs to be tested. Tell them about this and the cost of the machine you need for it, also the cost of calibration of equipment every year and the very expensive labels (depending on machine). You'll probably find all of this comes to more than the cost of a professional who'd have it done in about three days.

Nice idea mate but this is what WSB thinks of that:

This could get messy. One or two of the bros already have a tash. If the beardy-shavey sect hear about this god knows what will happen. Night of long razors and all that.

We're doing it here but its already contentious and has different factions. The official line is that we all have to be clean shaven on Friday before we break up. I've already made a canny start by getting a beard - ready to shave off and leave a mo for the length of November which will only improve and mature into something magnificent rather than the 'lashed with a dirty skippy rope' look. A months growth isn't going to yield a mighty tash. I've been told this is wrong but most of the other bros are going for beards! I can't because the bits at the corner of my mouth don't grow. Really we're both wrong but if they think beards are OK, then I'm not shaving the tash. Is there a tash ombudsman to write to before this descends into sectarian violence and war?

Thanks a lot Duke. That'll do for the time being. Scripting is something I really need to learn though.

AARRRGGHHH!!! I've been trying to configure a new backup drive for the server. Its a Hitachi 4TB Touro USB 3.0 job. To my horror I've learnt the hard way that 2008 Server backup doesn't like any disks with a sector size of more than 512B. Modern big disks are 4K. This shouldn't be any bother as all these big disks can emulate 512B as Hitachi proudly point out in their advanced format brief. But no, the enclosure doesn't pass on this emulation so you're stuck with 4K. No to worry, I'll have the VM make a couple of 2TB VHDs on it, then format those as 512B. No. VHDs wont play with 4K disks either. Microsoft are not particularly to blame but server 2008, which I used to love, has gone way down in my estimation. And Hitachi are just liars. Now what? I've read that western digital disks can properly emulate 512B so buying one is an option but I'm going to look a bit of a pillock asking for one so soon after that. Has this happened to anyone else? Has anyone got this to work somehow other than dropping another £150? Cheers! James

Hello John. We started using it in September and so far so good. Especially as its free. I've only been using the exchange functionality so far though. We never had an exchange server before and used the council's POP/SMTP setup so this is a vast improvement already. I haven't configured any clients as the web app is just as good as locally held Outlook. Saved loads of ball ache. Migrating PSTs wasn't easy though. The PST capture app they give you wouldn't work (I blame our council's WAN though) so I used an outlook client at home (that wouldn't connect either in school) to get a few up. Working slowly through the rest now. Everyone gets the same experience at home as though do at work so very happy users. The data protection issue usually found with cloudy stuff isn't an issue for us as it was always policy not to send sensitive info in emails. Just get it, its free and you can trial it with a select few users. Hope this helps you make your decision. James

How much Luke (doesn't have to be an official quote)? I'm hoping to be allowed to buy 16.

Do you sell the 55" Iiyamas?

Very encouraging. Thanks very much!

I know but I think the boss might be game for it. I just don't want to spend £30,000 ish and them all be smashed within a year. You got any?

Hello everyone! This is my first post so hope some of you could offer some advice. I've recently replaced all of our monitors with nice big 24" ones that look lovely at 1920 x 1080 which is great and you'd think would make for nice happy users. Not so. The problem arises with the teacher PC that controls the IWB. Our old monitors were 17" CRTs that I had inherited with a little VGA splitter to send 1024 x 768 to both monitor and projector. No bother. IWBs are square, the new monitors are rectangle - so a clone looks crap on the monitor or IWB, whichever way around it is. I knew this before I did it so bought a load of cheap dual-output graphics cards and configured them seperately to their native resolutions with an extended desktop setup. Now the users can't/won't grasp how this works despite showing them lots of times and want (seriously) their old monitors back. They've already been melted down and turned into spitfires or something by now though so no chance of that. Our IWBs are getting quite old now and I love the look of the massive LCD touchscreens. No calibration, clones easily, kids don't block the projector, the list goes on for the pros. The only cons I can see are smaller size which I don't think would be too much of a problem and possibly durability. I work in a special needs school where equipment takes a lot of punishment. I was looking at the big 55" Iiyama one and couldn't find anything about durability on their site or resellers sites. I can't find any reviews either. Does anyone on here have any experience with these especially with regards to how tough they are? Cheers in advance James