southhamster

We've had this come up and staff don't use their personal phones for pics. I have special dispensation ONLY for pics of kit and serial numbers. This is partly because if you need a school camera there is never one working with batteries etc depite buying loads each year and also its just so damned convenient. However I am very well aware of the issues and as you say trust is vital here.

Also reminds me there is a neat Learnpad feature in the portal which shows the current charge level of each tablet so you can see if any any are duff straightaway as soon as they turned on.

No, we are on Win 7 but playing with the wmi script and it looks promising, maybe get it working with psexec. to interrogate each laptop every 15 mins or so and append the log.

Thanks all, that looks useful. Just had another thought. If I start them up and check the Unifi wifi logs history it shows how many minutes a machine connects for so could calculate it from that!

Evening all. Our 60 laptops are now around 3 years old and some have quite short battery life. Naturally no one ever tells us which ones. I'm wondering if anyone's got some bright ideas for automating a test e.g. thrashing the HDU and sending an email at 25 percent dicharge to give a start and end time. Any thoughts?

Would be quite something to watch if it decided to do its 0-60 party trick of 2.8 seconds. A bit like when I tried to keep up with a Laverda Jota on my old style Triumph Bonneville....no point.

Not much of a gamer but used to love battle chess for DOS. When you moved a piece it would come to life and smash the opposing piece. CGA graphics wow!

For true boredom you need a stealth taxi aka. Toyota Avensis. I'm yawning just typing this. Would love a Tesla Roadster but not really any space for bags of compost that Mrs southhamster seems to need so often.

Nope.way off

Hmm. Maybe I'll have to trade in the most boring car in the world* for a Saab. *can you guess what southhamster drives? Clue: it has a huge boot for all my tools and kit - a kind of mobile IT disaster recovery wagon.

This has always bugged me. Really, on a modern car how hard is to monitor the current drain to each lamp with a sensor and tell me when a lamp is open circuit or short. Would be such a useful thing. Hey @witch if you're still bored at home maybe you could knock up a circuit to do this and interface to the car CANBUS system. You could make a fortune!

We have been trialling RM books on learn pads which is interesting as the accounts can be managed like a proper library and books borrowed. Plus no danger of little Johnny downloading 50 shades of something or other.

In the school I do 9 hours a week at I have a desk in the corner of the staffroom. It's bit noisy sometimes but during lessons only a few staff doing prep. The good thing is people can easily find me. The bad thing is the same, but they are a good bunch and we all get along.

Norton Commander for messing with DOS.

I think it was around £15 per machine per year. The UK reseller we used was Computerworld Business Solutions T: 0121 643 5362 F: 0121 643 1267 W: www.cbs.cc who've been very helpful. Annoying to have to spend this kind of money on top of our Mcafee subscription, but at least we can protect our most important machines (hopefully...)

Yes. +1 that! We've now added malwarebytes pro to our administration PCs SLT laptops and server as Mcafee is pretty useless at catching a lot of dodgy stuff. Also found spice works alien vault picks up the odd IP probe to add to our block list.

I Find As long as I plug the output from the tone gen onto the rj45 wire copper direct (sacrifice a drop cable) it can discriminate enough to I'D one cable in bunch.

On the 05:58 being down country but looking forward to some tasty/useful freebies and getting my annual supply of pens.

I have one crom CPC that works well except that the sliding power switch gets stuck on the case and runs the battery down but ok for the money. cpc.farnell.com/paladin-tools/1573/toneprobe-kit/dp/IN05644

@Kingstech. Thursday with my computing coordinator who is young enough to be my son!

Now that was a cool band.

Startech.com do a good range with most connector options.

Is it a competition? "You're Very PC and I claim my £5"

That's a really good question which I've always wondered about. Is it to save 2 grams weight and 2p off production costs? We get more bent/damaged sockets and cables because of this. Also one more thing for staff to not plug in properly and call us out to "fix."

I'll be seeing you there in an effort to improve some of my school's laughable Internet bandwidth.