thesofa

Hmm, more blooming students clogging up the bars drinking a half of lager and blackcurrant for 3 hours You will need a warm fleece up here. You will not need so much beer money as long as you stay away from the trendy pubs in durham. Which College? I was at Mildert in '67

We too are having all the same issues that you have, PLUS we had a complete day outage last Monday, even though the fault occurred last Sunday, Durhamnet claimed they have no access to the equipment at night and weekends. I worry about this as they are the ISP for Durham and Darlington NHS Trust, so I assume they provide Internet services to the hospitals..... with no Switchroom access at weekends?

Just do what we did, take your time ordering spares, get the SMT to try to recover the cost of the damage from the parents, you should always be able to find out the last logged in user, they are always the culprit, even when innocent! We made a point of having a huge pile of damaged laptops just inside the door so anyone coming in saw them and asked. We never deliver the repaired ones back to department, they have to come and get them, this reinforces their duty of care over the laptops. Take your time replaceing dead batteries, make sure you bulk buy, we found the best source was XMA, both for batteries and power supplies. do a presentation to the smt showing relative spares costs and life issues, along with a projection of the maintenance costs for 3 years and show them login times for a room full of laptops compared to the login times for a room of wired PCs. Point out that frustrated kids, having to wait long times for logins will do more damage than those that are engaged straight away. Sorry if I lapsed into Teacher-babble, surrounded by it all day, even earplugs and Loud Pink Floyd do not keep it all out!. You will win purely on the financial front, cos they will not understand the technical issues, they will think they do, just make sure they don't. We have a room of laptops trying to print wirelessly from them to an A3 colour laser printer set at 1200 dpi, A3 sheets of loads of colour photographs, they are lucky to get three or four in a lesson printed, plus it stops nearly all the other laptops in their tracks. Do the sums for the amount of data flowing from the laptop to the wireless point, to the servers and back to the printer and show them where the bottlenecks are. Another thing, we found the most reliable method of configuring them was using windows wireless configuration rather than the utility supplied with the wireless card. Good luck

I run the network in a school with full wireless coverage, supplied from 46 Cisco 1200 wap. We run an .11G network and all teachers have a wireless laptop, until last summer there were over 300 laptops for curriculum use in the school. The Senior Leadership team have finally realised that wirelssly connected laptops are a really bad Idea, the WAPs have to be turned right down to 5% power output to prevent interference, we have had to do a very complicated scheme of channels to prevent interference from one wap to another, the laptops are used all over school, the kids seem to think they have the right to remove keys at will from the keyboards, requiring expensive and time consuming repairs. The teachers expect wired speeds from the wireless, they do not understand that a .11G network only runs at 54MBps, giving around 30 MBps at the desktop, when this is split between 10 laptops, ir relates to 300Kbytes a second, once kids start streaming from the servers or loading virtual CDs from the multimedia server, the whole system grinds to a halt. The maintenance costs on laptops are really high compared to desktops, the batteries will die after about 13 months, each time an angry kid hits the screen in frustration, you face a bill of around 200 to 250 for a replacement screen. Spend the £28K on creating decent computer suites and get the PCs from a solid supplier, with good glass fronted screens and keep your costs for maintenance right down. If you want details of where I have been buying machines and monitors from, just PM me. HTH

It sounds like you can run a bus through there too!