Homer3334

Thanks Warwick_tech - its almost a year on but this post helped me quite a bit Im warwick too, interested to know which parts your working in? PM.

This is exactly what we were after! thanks very much for your help

Ahhh what a great vid, think you might be right - grasping at straws!!

Hi All, Here's a weird one, its probably a silly question but we've discovered that when one of our clients creates a new staff member in SIMS, there "Role" (such as Employee, Teacher, user) doesn't come up as 'Employee' automatically. We are trying to add the "employee" role to these teachers, but can't find it anywhere. Anyone know where to go? Feels like its should be straightward but we just aren't finding it! Please see attachment for the bit i mean,Thanks

Thanks FN, not a bad idea! might include that option to SLT and see what they think

Evening all We have inherited a client with a shed load of 32gb asus t200ta tablets/laptops which the staff use as their main laptops. There are the usual challenges with updating since only the 32gb storage, we've been lucky enough to know someone very useful with a soldering iron, but the chips are basically made to stay, I heard even the manufacturer throws the board away with any bad solders for defects (as they are so cheap) With all the background out the way, my question is do you think its possible to: 1. Install windows 10 to a 64gb class 10 sd card (think we have this bit done already) 2. Boot to the SD card (the hard part) even in a fairly indirect way. The bios won't boot to anything other than USB stick or onboard emmc, my theory is to put just the bootloader/boot selection in the 32gb emmc and basically have that point to Windows on the SD card to live and run off there. Unfortunately splitting the OS and SD card by distributing apps and such isn't a good option for us, we'd ideally like the whole thing to run off the SD card via the bootloader We did some experimenting with Linux and got it to "select boot" from startup, but obviously from there is difficult as Linux and Windows, would imagine we could get Ubuntu working this way but not Windows....? Any suggestions really welcome, thanks in advance

Thanks everyone for amazingly quick, and detailed replies, Agree with all the points here; especially that where public money is involved then it should be transparent. When it comes to renewal dates and who the contact is for deciding/renewing said contracts, we all had similar thoughts here that this does sound like touting for business, and no doubt the schools will be pestered in the future with targeted marketing requests. I did think however, this might not necessarily be a bad thing if it helps keeps suppliers honest and competitive - just the method is horrible; using law to make already very busy schools take time to address marketers... As you've all said however, not much we can do and will advise the school to reply with the info requested! Thanks again EDIT: After replying I have read the latest 3 messages - this sounds like a very good route to go down. Especially Lonix hearing that your place already has this policy and is exercising it - should help weed out the insincere/unscrupulous requests at least...

Hi all, Sorry wasn't sure where to post this exactly, don't think there's a right place for it! A couple of schools we provide services for have been asked to provide the following details via Freedom of Information Act (FOI) Personally I don't have an issue with this being disclosed, but the school has asked me if i could find out the legitimacy and requirement to respond. Have done lots of reading and still can't find an answer. The person making the request has emailed the school(s) and asked for: - Which company/who provides IT support? - Who in the school looks after/deals with support contracts? - At what cost? - Renewal dates? The email is from a hotmail address and is signed with a full name at the bottom. I'm interested to find out if any of you have come across similar things and if anyone has information on how best to go forward? Do we need to fully comply, or partially? What does your school do? Thanks

Morning all, Strange problem this one, hoping someone can help and/or has experience with it. We've starting to use MonkeyJam recently and its working really well, expect for when it comes to loading and saving projects. The message we get is: " is not a valid integer value (The quotation mark here is part of the error message). It leaves the kids being unable to save their work or occasionally it prevents then loading it also - which is always a bit soul destroying. The problem was originally with Windows 7 SP1 and with redirected docs as standard; I did wonder if it might be to do with it not liking something in the default save path, a character or weird interpretation of spaces - something like that. Incidentally we've since wiped these machines and clean installed Windows 10 (build 1607) and added the minimum in terms of software's and policy; that's helped a bit - but still occurs in patches. Any idea's gratefully received!

Anyone ever had to get something set up for an assembly in 10 mins, which the whole assembly relies on, but it's going wrong and there are hundreds of children coming in.. Then the staff are saying to the kids "Hopefully IT man can get it working in time!". Then it goes quiet and everyone just waiting for you to sort it out so they can start. Woke up middle of night cold sweat with that one a few times

Can I borrow your Number 4 pls and replace my 2 and 3 with it

Some of these are brilliant, and made me extend my list to at least 15. Apple and flash being pretty high up now.

Know what you mean and agree with you. Actually I can safety say I'm pretty ignorant of teaching and behaviour management (as in; dont know much about it, wouldn't know the first thing if a class is kicking off). Not by choice, but the situation we are in by definition makes us all automatically ignorant both ways. we are all specialists and could not do each others jobs. In honestly don't know how teachers do theirs some days. If I'm having a bad day, at least I can spend 5 minutes out of the limelight, work on something a bit less frustrating that afternoon or something. Teachers literally have no escape (although I did hear of one a couple of weeks back "having enough of this s***" and literally going home mid lesson) still don't know what the kids did to them!!

Someone reported this to me this week too, glad to see it on here. My first question was "is it w10" but was expecting edge to be the problem and not chrome! We use impero in school, but is a problem at home for some using their own equipment

Sorry that should have read: *blissful ignorance

+1 for ignorance

Damn I forgot about Apple! That would have made my top 2 easily. Thanks for the tips Managed switches 👍

Evening all, There's a couple of us techys doing IT in schools and recently we've been subjected to a string of "annoying jobs" that all cropped up in the same week. That got us talking, and weve been nodding along to what we both find particularly tedious or laborious. Its accepted that these kinds of things come up every now and again in any line of work, but it got me thinking. What's your top 5 (I'm order of worst to slightly less worse) of jobs you have to do in your role of ict school techy? Ours would be : 1. Photocopier secure printers setup for cross brand, 80+ codes. 2 . Conflicting Firewall policies / Port issues. 3. Finding "that setting" in Group Policy and testing vigoursly. 4. Audit! 5. Finding bloody rogue APs that put a 192. DHCP server on the network (because someone brought their old home router in to boost the wireless in their classroom - great idea!) This may sound like a moan but genuinely I love this job and the variety is like no other. Interested to know your thoughts and if we are the only ones!

Not sure why it keeps changing, think it must be a part of the software to take out the line where the activities are installed if it (wrongly) detects the activity pack not to be there. The manual says the 'yellow head will be grey if the activities arnt installed' so guessing some kind of polling must take place to see if they are installed, then the ini is modified? (incorrectly of course) so it may be a bug. Have you tried modifying the ini so it's correct, then denying access on write and modify to everyone? Not exactly a fix for the underlying cause, but seems to stop my ini from being "mutilated".

Had a problem with windows 7 black screen of death with cursor problem not booting into safe mode or allowing system restore . Tried everything, anti virus, malware bytes, system restore, last known good, uninstall in updates from cmd, chkdsk variations and finally got it fixed today with... Sfc /scannow The tool which I thought was there for show and has never done anything for me in 10 years of Ict finally came through for me today. Sorry I ever doubted you. Interested to know your experiences with this and if Sfc is actually a bit a dark horse and not just "something everyone seems to try that never works" since I abandoned it as a step never worth taking a couple of years ago

Honestly, been with SB for nearly 4 years. Support has been great for us, changeovers and installs have always been simple and problem free. Any changes we need to make they do them over the phone or I can make them, which is very helpful for us. The firewall is flexible and the Internet fast. The recent outages are a small blemish on an otherwise outstanding record for us. We were the only school in our entire County to move from Lea broadband so you can imagine how nerve wrecking that was for us (especially since the Lea had no experience connecting to schools not on their broadband, they couldn't tell us what would happen) and it's been a big success. The challenges we came up against where sorted well and got over every hurdle. Although the first days of changeover I felt the same as you. Don't worry I would say your in good hands.

This is a good one. Does it happen always when gaming, and are there specific games it happens with too?

Maybe we should be helping schools broadband out, we are collection of it experts afterall For instance, have they tried turning filter 11 off and on again?

Great - Glad you got it working

Sounds like standard IT gremlins TBH, they've been screwing up networks of mine for years (or maybe that says more about me than the grems) +1 for driver install +1 also for trying a static address If you have a spare wifi USB adaptor about usually installing that and seeing if that connects (if you have a USB port available in the stick). That would rule out general issues with the stack at least so you can concentrate on other areas Maybe restarting the AP (not the router) might help as well? Sometimes conflicting DHCP addresses cause this too - but seem to be much rarer a problem.