southhamster

Well, amazingly quotes to upgrade 3 of 4 schools to FFTC (up to 60GB) have arrived today so that's good news. The 4th is still subject to the whims of Openreach, but at least it feels like some progress is possible. Looking forward to backups taking less than a day!

Most of the good sites are either developed or uneconomic. Bringing the HV grid to remote areas is very expensive as well as the long payback on the massive civil works. The Scottish Hydro Board did most of the UK capacity in the 50's. Also flooding lots of pretty scenery and putting up more grid lines would provoke the NIMBY brigade, so larger new works are probably limited. There's a lot of potential with small schemes (run of river) at old mills and beside rivers; especially using the archimedes screw devices as they don't damage fish. Here's a community funded example near us on the River Dart; the local college will use the electricity onsite and sell the rest onto the grid. Dart Renewables

Would be interesting to know what the exact fault was. I've seen batteries in old UPS that looked like they could explode but never had the scare of smoke and fire. Ultimately anything with lots of power going through it can blow up. The skill of the designer is containing it safely. I have seen a three phase solar PV inverter burnt out completely - there wasn't much left inside the metal case!

The paper makes a huge difference. Mrs hamster has an Epson 3880 A3 printer which can produce stunning prints with beautiful colours but only on decent paper. On ordinary copier stuff it's meh. She likes Canson paper but it is pricey. It's worth seeing if you can get some sample packs to compare. Also a good lesson for students to think about all the factors that affect printing.

But if you're "roaming the site" how do we catch you? Perhaps we could make a Very PC trap and bait it with Edugeek socks.

Completely agree. These schools are moving to a joint academy structure and want use GAFE, video conferencing etc for integration but connection speed really lets them down.

Thanks everyone for your replies. I'll be at BETT next week so aiming to visit suppliers then. SWGFL have done their best but BT openreach won't replace old cables unless they really have to. It just feels frustrating that Openreach answer to no one yet are responsible for critical infrastructure. Round here you can see lines through trees not cut back and ropey looking poles. Previously these schools were on a 2mb copper leased line which at least guaranteed performance.

Let us know when you are visiting the Lenovo BETT stand and we can have an edugeek flash mob !

Posting this because I'm fed up with the pathetic broadband in 4 of the schools that I support. It makes using anything internet based a struggle with more than a handful of users and really disadvantages the children and staff. Backups over internet can take days and things like video conferencing are very hit and miss. The highest speed I've seen is around 6 mbps download and around 1.2 mbps upload in one school but that was on a very good day. The lowest around 2 mbps download and 280 kbps up. 3 of these schools have to combine 3 ADSL lines to get even this pathetic throughput. I know these are all small rural primaries, but they are all in villages with shops, pubs, running water etc, and only a few miles from towns. So, can anyone share a worse speed test than this?

Yeah I've seen that on a couple of Stone laptops although they did just about pick up the SSID but no signal strength even when next to the AP. At least it was quick to fix. Some HP laptops need a utility to turn on wifi/blue tooth properly. Are there any diags on the site like Dell provide?

The world will be a lot quieter without him. First saw Motor head on the bomber tour supported by Saxon. An astounding performance! Time to raise a glass of JD and crank up Ace of Spades to 11...

+1 that. Some things I don't mind buying generic but PSU'S are not one of them. It's frustrating the difference in price though.Genuine HP laptop PSU'S can be as low as £15 for the G0 type but 2 or 3 times that for others.

...All over the school laptop.

Thursday for me. I'm even bringing our new ICT coordinator as a special bonus!

Are there any recent RM driver packs that might help? I think we had a similar problem with this type of Realtek NIC on HP.250 G2. It's also worth trying a CC4 boot disk/usb to try and narrow it down. I think we ended up trying various drivers until we hit that worked.

Agreed. It's all about management. This is where learn pads can be good. The teacher can freeze or blank the screens and choose which apps or websites appear. I don't know how easy /good ipads are to control in this way but surely that is a large part of it. I've seen some really successful Lear pad lessons but they do need to be planned in advance which doesn't seem to be the way that some teachers work...

Infrequently vile

I like the steam punk cat.

Sorry scratch that I thought it was a projector .

Can you try a similar length cable direct to the projector to try and narrow it down a bit. Could be a cheap cable which is struggling.

First rule of being cat: never look amused.

Yes +1 the integrals. All teaching staff have one and in 2 years none of the 20 or so have been broken or lost or even passwords forgotten (I may regret writing that..) We get staff to sign a receipt and write their password which is kept in the safe. We also gave them all a document explaining how to use it which helped.

What about people wearing headphones or ear buds and/or hooded? I see drivers, cyclists and pedestrians on the narrow lanes round here like this. Often you can hear a car before you see it and ready to jump in the hedge. And what happened to walking on the side facing incoming traffic?

That would be the icing on the cake...

Geek hardware heaven! Thanks DaveP.