Thesweeney

Agreed.. RIP. Read his books from the start, did a comparison between hunt for red October and red storm rising for English at school (showing my age now).. Makes me want to dive in loft, dig them out and read them again.

I have a lumia 710 running the old WP 7.5.. Nokia Drive works a treat for me. On payg and never noticed a big hit on my data usage..

Not long finished Ken folletts world without end, now wading through the new Dan brown one.. Like others have said, bit hard going but typical brown really.. Waiting for the third part of Robyn youngs insurrection trilogy hopefully some point this year.. Failing that might try to find dantes Devine comedy ;D

A daughter of 13 and a permanently empty wallet here..

One other thing to try is dropping the router down to 802.11 b/g speeds.. I had similar probs with older (4-5 yr old) laptop when I got the new virgin connection here.. Kept dropping out, reigned the router back from .11n speeds to .11b/g and suddenly everything working fine..!!

Ta much.. Not blocked here (well they weren't anyway, are now..)

I'll throw UK Laser Supplies into the mix. Used them at my previous school, converted the one I'm at now to them and the bursar here has got all the feeder primaries using them too. NBD delivery, remanufactured, free serviceing on printer etc.. Very good all round.. Edit to add - Forgot to say they do collections of the dead/empties too.. Contact details available on request..

Full Windsor every morning.. Suppose that's what too many of my younger years in the forces does for you..

Ex-Plod... Say no more..

Tell me about it... Phone hasn't stopped...!! No matter how many times you tell them there is nothing we can do about it, they still bleat on about 'Why haven't YOU fixed it yet..?' GGGGAAAAAAAAAAAA The connection is up and down like a toms underkecks here, bl@@dy annoying!!

For the pupils its FLLddmm F-first initial LL-first 2 letters of family name dd-day of birth mm-month of birth (for John Smith born 17th Feb = JSM1702), AD logon however is year starting followed by full name (eg 7JohnSmith). Staff is purely first initial followed by family name (FBloggs). Domain is school.lea.sch.uk.

"ours is not to reason why...." To be honest I have not got a clue how all this came about. We have only been providing support for this particular school for the last 5 months or so.. From reading between the lines of what the head down there has been saying they have had a string of very poor support and advice from both the LEA and the secondary school local to them that used to provide the support. The wheels were already in motion for the CC4 upgrade by the time we took over, plus the teachers there seemed happy with CC3 even though they themselves have said it's carp...

Server is brand new... Twin Xeon 1.60GHZ 2Gb DDR2 Twin 500Gb SATA HDD Integrated Intel Dual-Channel Gb Ethernet Plus the other usual stuff... So yeah, it could well be down to the infrastructure.. But it is a small primary (no more than about 80 pupils), and consequently has a limited budget...

@ Butuz: Everything is 100BaseTX...

@ russdev: All noted, but there has never been any mention of the site being used for/as a field trial. As far as myself, the head and in house ICT co-ord were aware it was a live roll out, been all the way through the documentation/e-mail and everything. Have they not been doing these field trials for a couple of months now?? Surely the RM tech would have been aware, or at least made aware, before coming onsite to do this upgrade of the issues that appear to happen cross-site.. My point being that we probably wasted a good day and a half on trying to resolve what should have been known issues to him.. Your point 8 - Yes I know.. Has anyone ever managed to get it to work properly;) Point 9 - OK so it is a known issue. How long have they known about it? With you knowing would indicate that RM have known for a while, and given that they are rolling this out in a live teaching environment where it has the ability to seriously disrupt the learning experience for the little people, surely they should be working on a resolution on the hurry up.. Sorry if it is sounding like I am having a bit of a rant here.... Deep breath...and relax...

The spec of the systems seemingly had no effect on the build time, took the same on brand new Sempron 2000+ with 1Gb ram as it did on the legacy systems (1.8G P4 256Mb ram/2.8G Celeron 192Mb ram). Network is switched 100base, and we probably had only about 10 systems max building at any one time. From chatting with the RM tech that was down with us there, some other sites have been having the same timescales when building CC4 systems..

XP. The legacy systems are no where near beefy enough to take Vista (192Mb RAM, and they are only 2 yr old RM Ones!!!)

Well.. The migration to CC4 is done.. RM said 1 day start to finish, actually took the best part of 4!!! Must admit it does look nice and the new RMMC is better to use that the CC3 version.. Some of the points raised during the upgrade are below, hope these help those heading down the CC4 route, or make you think again!! 1. New RM supplied server hardware had chipset driver compatibility issues during server migration, causing re-imaging to fail. **Cost a good half day whilst RM tech was trying to rectify** 2. NIC driver rollback was required on the server to overcome failures on all client systems during build process. This failure is caused by the NIC driver on the server being ‘too recent’. **Cost 3-4 hours of build/re-build time whilst trying to figure this one out** 3. Workstation builds can only be done by bootable CD, but has just been released by RM on their support site, of the ability to make a bootable USB pen drive for systems that have no optical drive. 4. Legacy systems with low amounts of RAM (256Mb and under) require a ‘low-RAM’ boot CD, which seemingly needs to be left in for practically the entire build process. 5. NIC drivers need to be added to the boot images prior to burning, they do not come already in the image. **Not initially known by RM tech, cost 2 hours build time and several CD-R’s** 6. Boot CDs are site specific, so if you have multiple sites all going CC4 then you can’t use the one ‘master’ disc for all sites. 7. Workstation builds taking in excess of 6-7 hours from start to finish, due in part to the number of packages that were needing to be installed (in this case IRO 120, including hotfixes etc.). 8. Build was hanging for approx 2 hours+ on the systems attempt to install DigitalBlue movie software, which, it was later found out, is not compatible with CC4 in its current build configuration. **Again not known by RM tech until had spoken with other techs doing same upgrades at other sites.** 9. Workstations are re-booting themselves when a user logs back on after locking the system. RM is aware of this and working on a fix. All in all, it probably is not all that bad, but as I said it took 2 of us the best part of 4 days to upgrade a site of 1 server and 55 workstations!! I really would not like to go through this on a large site.. Stay safe The Sweeney

Whole site.. Both their 1 day quote and the 3 day actual.. 1 server and 55 workstations...

Hi All, Just going through a 'live' migration from CC3 to CC4 at one of the Primary schools I cover. There have been a few issues with the upgrade of the existing systems, mainly drivers, and some software incompatabilities (DigiBlue!!!). Once we have it all tied down and running I will give you the full SP regarding the issues/workarounds etc.. BTW - RM quoted 1 day to do the whole upgrade job.. We are halfway through day 3 and still not done...