ranj

Hi Previously i had a focus (earlier model) which I purchased an aftermarket radio for which was a Sony DAB6650 radio, i now want to take this out my old car and move it into my new Focus (newer model). I pulled out the stereo from the old focus and was shocked with all the cables..... there were so many! I left it in there because I thought I would never be able to reconnect this into the new focus. The additional difficulty is the aftermarket stereo has a dab aerial which I will need to remove also. I believe I would need to buy a new face plate to suit the new focus shape, do I need to buy different cables or would the cables from the old focus work? Sorry I dont know what the correct names for the cables are. I attach some pictures to hopefully help. If I successfully manage to take it out, in the old focus I want to put the original ford stereo back in, I have misplaced the radio code. Does anyone know where I could get this from? Many thanks

ok panic over. The problem was as my PC has built in RAID on the mobo, whilst it restarted, Windows lost connection for whatever reason with the raid controller. so it couldn't see the hard drive. I went into the recovery section, and there was an option to load drivers. I loaded the RAID drivers, it then picked up the hard drive, it repaired it by running a scandisk and it booted up fine. Phew Panic over!!! spent 2 hours trying to sort this issue out... how annoying.

Hi On my office PC I have been using Windows 7 for about 2 months with no issues. I was using it fine this morning but had to restart it but now when it boots up it doesnt bootup into 7 instead I get a screen which says System Recovery Options. 1. Select language 2. Select an operating system to repair and click Next. (I clicked Windows 7) 3. Password 4. (Then the screen) SYSTEM RECOVERY OPTIONS which includes the options of doing Startup Repair, System Restore, Windows Complete PC Restore, Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool, Command Prompt, Recovery Manager. I am quite upset because I have clicked just about everyone one of those and none can get me back into 7. Any advice/tips would be most appreciated. I have run the memory diagnostic scan and that reported no issues. Thanks so much!

I would advise Ubuntu as it is a good starter for someone new to Linux, Like you I have been trying to learn Linux (focussing on Ubuntu and OpenSuse) the more I use it the more I learn. Both are great platforms. I was spending a lot of time on these 2 OS's until Windows 7 came along which I love (well done Microsoft). I would recommend OpenSuse as well as that has by far the best software downloader tool (called yast) which makes installing applications very easy from its library of 1000s of apps. The new Ubuntu whilst I haven't installed it yet I have heard good things about it.

Hi I wanted to trial out the new version of VM workstation 7. I currnetly have VM's configured on version 6.5 and was hoping I could have both versions on my laptop but it wont let me. Has anyone tried version 7 and if you have existing VM's, will they work on the latest version? Thanks

Is that RTM or still in Beta?

Why dont you give Microsoft certification a try? There is a website where you can take sample questions just to get a flavour of what the questions will be like, be aware some questions are fairly complex but hopefully by looking at the questions it will give you an idea of the sort of questions expected. Its quite fun too if you into testing your knowledge. http://www.microsoft.com/click/areyoucertifiable/default.aspx

I have just had a look too, whilst the adamo looks really nice, if it was my money I would buy the Mac just because you can have the best of both worlds. If you do work with media, i.e. photoshop, movies and audio I dont think you can beat a Mac. They are that good. Especially if you have a new generation camcorder which utilises HDD or SD features, something as simple as iMovie just WORKS with a Mac, its a bit of a fiddle with PC applications. Thats just my view anyway. You could have the best of 3 worlds, Mac, windows and Linux.

download a program called cpu-z (free download of the net) run this and it will tell you exactly what RAM is installed in your PC, this will give you an idea of what you need to buy.

Maybe this very useful video on lite deployment of windows 7 in the enterprise may help. Word of warning though the video is over an hour long but goes into great detail about deploying windows 7. Worth watching if you are planning on using microsoft deployment toolkit 2010. http://blip.tv/play/hIxygauBaQI Courtesy of Nicky Curtis and co of IT idiots.

Hi I have been tasked to give training to our office and non teaching staff for our new Frog VLE. I am just curious to see how other schools get their adminstrative and other non teaching staff (e.g. pastoral, Heads of years) to use their learning platform. I can think of a few things that would be useful for these types of staff such as: a portal site containing all relevant policy documents as well as a forms section for all staff to access to reduce paper based forms as well as creating discussion forums and maybe run the odd poll or two. Does anyone have any other ideas they can give me? I need to do a two hour session on this and am worried I might not have enough to talk about. It be good to hear how others schools have implemented their platform so non teachers are also making good use of it. Thanks

I would recommend the Netgear Readynas Duo boxes. You can pick one up for about £140 from dabs and they are also offering a free 500gb disk. Its got RAID1, it can be a sort of media centre. It consumes very low power about 1/10th of a PC. You can even tell it to shutdown at certain times and power on on a schedule. Its very efficient you can use it to house all your music and photos and can share them through various devices. If you have usb printer you can also share it so it can be accessed on numerous machines. You can also advertise your nas box over the internet so you can access your files outside of your home. Wouldn't recommend this though unless you setup the security properly. Its even got a bit torrent client where you can download torrents saving having to leave your PC on. I have the Netgear RND2000 series and would recommend it highly.

If you can open the server, maybe you can find the speaker header where its causing from and pull out the cable...

Thats great, that statement is more in the line of what I need. the only information I am missing is the subject information or teaching group. I thought the table name may be subjectid but that didnt work. Does anyone know what the table name is for subject or teaching group? thanks

Check you SMTP connector in system manager if your running exch 2003 to ensure that your smart host is selected or hasn't changed. It may have affected the settings when you removed smtp service. Also download exchange best practises analyser on the server and run the test this will alert you of any potential issues with ways to resolve them. you can download it from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=DBAB201F-4BEE-4943-AC22-E2DDBD258DF3&displaylang=en

This is more of a question for birmingham schools. I remember somewhere on the bgfl site there were some user guides for CMIS. I am struggling to find them now. In particular I am looking for one to do with reporting. I want to see if there is anything in their guides to advise me on how I could export the information I need into a file.

Resolved now, used Tight VNC instead of UltraVNC (which is what I always used) and it works. For some reason on 7 I wasn't able to access a Mac OS 10.5 client/server.

Yeh I know, want to avoid this as much as possible. Serco do not like you touching the data using SQL. Would prefer not to do this also because if they have changed the data structure it means code needing to be rewritten again. Easiest option is to use a report in CMIS.

Hi I am currently making an enquiry to establish whether the following is possible in CMIS. Enquiring with a number of companies about a resource booking system built using web technologies (so can be access via a web browser in school or out of school), the system we are looking for is quite bespoke, for this to happen I need to pull out certain information from our MIS system CMIS and the information I need is Every room in the school that could be booked (classrooms, lecture rooms, IT rooms, hall) along with the teacher who is teaching for that period (if its a classroom) and the lesson being taught in there (e.g. biology, maths etc). I then need this information in either a comma separated CSV or text format, XML would be great also. I know in CMIS there is a way to do this but you can only print this information out, not been able to find a way to do this via an export. Has anyone else done something along the lines to this. If anyone could help it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Hi Since we moved to 10.5 we have noticed that when a user clicks on finder they also get the side bar, one element of the sidebar called shared we want to remove as this shows the user all the network clients (mac, linux and windows clients) around the school and it poses a bit of a security risk. I was hoping I could just import a plist, so logged in as a regular student user, went to finder preferences, unselected the areas which I didnt want the user to see. Then went to that users library, preferences and found the com.apple.sidebar.plist. So I copied this then went to the server and selected the student group where I want to enable this plist but when I log in as a student on a client to test it still shows up with the old settings, it likes it not registering the plist that I have popped in to use as a managed preference. Has anyone managed to successfully get this working so it is removed from certain groups of users or computers? On our OD network in workgroup manager we have 3 groups (admin, staff and students) and users are at least a member of one of the groups depending on their status in schoo and we have 2 suites of Mac clients, we also have a computer group for these. I tried to add the plist for the computers but didnt like me adding a plist for computers. I think it uses a different extension for managing computers. I did find this article but not sure if this would work. It seems like it interegates every user in workgroup manager and sets the com.apple.sidebar.plist for every user. Sounds messy and would prefer not to do it this way if I can avoid it. I am not 100% sure if this fix actually works... Re: Disable sharing in Leopard sidebar and [Casper] Getting rid of the "shared" computers list in the sidebar Can anyone help me? it would be most appreciated if there is a fix for this.

I thought this problem was resolved but I am still having issues and thought I would share it on here to see if anyone else suffered similar issues. I found out we had an issue when one of our laptops trolleys were being used which had 15 laptops on the go at the same time. I know our wireless network is designed for us to be able to use a significant number of laptops at the same time as it has the blanket technology rather than cell planning and when we had it working on IAS Radius on server 2003 it worked fine so am struggling to understand the problem. All laptops are on the domain. When a domain user logs in at logon, all laptops will connect fine to the wireless network but after about 50 minutes – 1 hour, we find that randomly laptops will disconnect from the wireless so the users lose connection to both network resources and the internet. The only way for us to resolve is to turn off the wireless and then turn it back on. I have updated all laptops with the changes from our conversations, I have also updated the wireless driver to the latest Intel driver which was released in September 2009 and have tried a few things such as leaving it more open so I can eliminate any possible connectivity problems but am having no luck. On our wireless network we have 2 SSIDs, one for any domain laptops which is the SSID configured through NPS and the other one is a visitor SSID which we use on guest non domain laptops and PDA’s. This is mainly for them to get on to the internet. This involves putting in a WPA key to activate the wireless, The visitor SSID is fine so I have eliminated any potential problems on the wireless switch side. I believe this is a configuration problem with NPS and was hoping someone might be able to assist me with this.

I knew there was some way just couldn't remember, for some reason I thought I would need some sort of tool for it. thanks

Hi I have a folder which has lots of IT ebooks in a range of pdf, doc, chm files (approx 1000) and I just want to sort all the files and move them into a particular folder so it easier for me to find what I am looking for. For example I may have about 40 different ebooks on SQL but they all wont be under the S section they will be all over the place with various different files names but will have SQL somewhere in there. I need a tool to be able to look in a folder, I then input a keyword such as 'sql' and then it looks through the whole directory and marks/identifies which files have SQL in the filename. I can then select these and move these into a folder called SQL etc etc. I have looked to see if windows explorer could do this or even dos but am struggling to find a solution. I am using Windows 7. Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks

No we only have 1 authorised DHCP server which is on one of the 2008 servers. Thanks