DrBeaker

We use it, our admin team manage it and buy it. They weren't cheap when I last looked! Depending on what your support is with them - warranty issues? I believe the printer is just a Brother printer with their logo on though.

I've still not received any links yet.

I noticed similar with ours when clicking on it, but it's gone now.

It's on NOW TV as on-demand streaming. Got it on my watchlist.

Cheers for the heads up. This Autumn release has been nothing but problems for us it seems.

It was using the lowest/slowest part of your system apparently. So 9/10 times it was the onboard graphics that were the lowest value.

Interesting. Would be interesting to see if staff paid to support school computers have to solve a problem on a school-owned device that's caused by improper personal usage of device. E.g. if their child has broken their school-assigned laptop when it's being used at home, does it warrant spending IT support time fixing it? Seems to be too many headaches and ifs and buts with this laptop scheme though. Setup RemoteApp or RDS and you've met that criteria or need to work from home. Having fast desktops meets the needs cheaper than fast laptops, with a lower TCO, reduces the stress and hassle for teachers and IT teams. If a teacher forget their pass/key, would they expect the IT team to go around and open doors for you all day? But they'd expect IT to give them a temporary laptop? Having a bit of kit like a laptop assigned to you is a privilege surely and that means you are responsible as a professional to bring that kit into work to do your job. Each school will vary and it's interesting to see the varied setups of different schools.

One point is no-one has mentioned yet - I thought you had to pay tax/declare if you had an "asset" like this through your employer? Same as a company car is a perk but a taxable perk I was always told? Someone wiser than I may have more info on this.

Well - seeing as last week when I went to swap back out a loan PC I'd put in one place, I'd found a teacher had taken it upon themselves to move a PC from another room to their classroom and not ask or inform m - after all what do GPOs, locations etc matter? That gives me all the excuse I need to lock them down with security cables now. So it would be a NO from me to the laptops straight away.

This it. Surely not inspecting something for nearly 10x years simply isn't good enough? Can you imagine if we didn't inspect our IT systems for 10x years? I mean an old car gets an MOT every year! Why don't schools get inspected more often? I don't get it.

Geofencing through an MDM app would potentially lock them down to work /site only? Don't know of any MDM that can do this? Factually teachers get paid a LOT more than support staff. So if I can afford a laptop for work/BYOD as support staff, I cannot see why someone on a higher salary cannot. IMHO that point can't really be argued by teachers, despite what people believe. Some teachers do have a sense of entitlement that as part of their job, they get a laptop/mobile device etc. I don't know where this comes from. LOT of good points mentioned here already. - bags, mice, keyboards etc. AFAIC it's not the responsibility of the school to provide devices for staff to use at home. If the school-owned device works at the school site and within the working hours of the school, that's what we're paid for, not getting it working on your home network. e.g. I've said here that if a remote control fails through wear and tear, we'll replace it. If it's lost, damaged or stolen that comes out of your faculty budget.

The logoff and logon process is how web filtering works, drives get mapped, policies for users v computers get applied etc. How would having laptops solve this problem? Desktops are quieter, more powerful, cheaper to upgrade, support more external displays etc. Someone mentioned today a computer was "Slow" when it logged on in under 2x mins - on an 8-year old HP 8200 with 8GB RAM and SSD. What do you expect? That's fine compared to the 20x min login time and unusable machines I had when I first started here. The brand new Dells we've got are under 1x min if that. By the time I've started my stopwatch they're already logged on. Surely the cost of laptops versus PCs should be enough of an argument? What about loss of data on a laptop? What about loss of kit? What happens if a teacher has their laptop and is off sick? That's then up to IT to solve the problem, which isn't right in my book. The list goes on...

Hmm..... We use Inventry but only for staff and visitors signing in and out. Good to know though.

Problem I'm getting/worried about is most of the RAM for the units I've got seems to be pretty much going or gone end-of-life. Then I'll be stuck with PCs we can't afford to replace and can't get the parts to upgrade them either.

I agree. I've pointed this example out to staff before https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/05/ico_fines_former_headteacher_for_pupil_data_dump/

One of the biggest things which put me off the Xbox One is the lack of removable hard drive AGAIN! PS3/PS4 allow you to change it so no technical reason why not. Buying the top of the line unit only gets you 1TB storage that is non-upgradeble. I guess being in IT this was more profound for me.

Sounds daft but 1) there's a few 360 games that didn't get put into backwards compatibility with the Xbox One that I play quite often. 2) nothing major from my 2 cents in new games that has prompted me to splash out the cash on a new console 3) same games as 1) are on Steam, but I don't want to play them on PC. So what's the excuse of Microsoft to not put them on the backwards compatibility list? No technical reasons with emulations etc we can't play the old games on a modern console.

How have you setup your screens out of interest? I've reusued the VGA splitter for the projector/TV and Displayport to DVI on the monitor. Using the 2x onboard graphics connections on the HP baseunit. I only had to buy the Displayport-DVi cable which was about £5. I'd ideally like 2x identical full HD screens but when I've projectors that only operate at 1024x768 it's a bit pointless.

Used Ricoh and Konica Miniolta in one place - The KM's were brilliant. Few minor issues but really nothing worth discussing. Sharp machines in this place out SBM sorted out with the copier company on a lease. These are fab. Had one issue and the support from Midshires was excellent.

These ones are teacher stations, they use the DVD drive as the DVD player. The stock HP drive is very noise in some of them. We've had some new DELL units that have a small slimline DVD drive that are student stations. The kids have broken the drives before I've had a chance to disable them.

Same problem with dust and noisy-as-heck DVD drives?

Yes I've got: 8-year old HP Compaq Elite 8200 units tested with running Windows 10. Had to downgrade the driver to get WoL to work. Legacy BIOS not UEFI 6-year old Dell Optiplex 3020 SFF I need to test with Windows 10. Currently on Windows 8.1 so can't imagine there's gonna be a problem. Has Legacy and UEFI BIOS options. Probably gonna keep Legacy BIOS option due to age of kit. New Dell SFF PCs with UEFI BIOS. Only these all have Windows 10. Upgrade and rebuild with Windows 10 is my goal this year.

I literally labelled my dual-screen classroom setups with a dymo label as "Teacher Screen" and "Classroom Screen". Teacher for SIMs etc only they can see and Classroom is one - the whole class can see. Both teachers have had no issues since I set it up for them. The rest I'm getting resistance from for some reason - their loss.

Thanks Graham. I know via these forums you helped me out with the migration to a new SIMs server back in 2018. You're a loss to the company! But best of luck for the future.

Cool idea! How did you get the RSS feed working with time and date? Are you using in-house or hosted Xibo server?