DrBeaker

Just thinking of you know who's gonna get blamed otherwise.... [emoji22]

Who made the final decision on going with Biostore? SBM, SLT etc? Just thinking of accountability etc.

Cunninghams, Groupcall etc largely the same - call, ring, email, carrier pigeon - all to no avail unless you really moan at them. Unfortunately maybe this will make schools realise, that they get what they pay for with 3rd parties and levels of support. These days it costs extra for phone support, some only do email.

We may have some of these we no longer need due to changes/upgrades. Can't promise as I need to check, but will happily check stock and you can have it, if we do have one?

We had similar with an old system Even installing the certificates on Android didn't fully work. But having severally limited resources never got to look at it further.

We had the demo and got as far as "you pay, you pay now" to continue using it. To my knowledge, they've still not paid for it lol. Can't see what it does that Google or Office 365 really already offer, some niche usage within the app for a lot of money really. Not my call. FYI they got hacked via the extension a few years ago. I've STILL not had an answer to my question regarding that from R&W.

Damm. They doing a 'Netflix' now then? I've been waiting for series 2 to drop for ages and to find it's the last one??

We'll give them some notice, usually 12x months as the upgrade cycle for AV simply works that way - after that they've been told. Same as wanting to access a subscription service after you've stopped paying. That's gonna be a no.

Not in production no. Even after 7x years, it's still a LONG way off the polish that Windows 7 had IMHO. So much junk, wasted apps, useless telemetry etc. Windows 10 was a "we've got no choice" sort of thing.

How do you do the shutdown tasks can I ask?

Won't that be a job for your site team or a 3rd party surely?

Ours is 11.4 on classrooms - I know, I know We were planning on 20 Basic but now our AV strategy is TVs instead. So once we've done all TVs and got rid of the last smartboard, we'll pull it from the network and warn staff ahead of time to convert, or die

In all my years of supporting and fixing them, no-one has ever shown me either .

That is an excellent point. To me you've clearly got it in hand, organised and informed than others who should know this stuff it seems. We had to do the same once with an IT suite in one block. Unless we staggered the times the mains tripped and overloaded.

That's fair enough. But buy cheap, buy twice and you know which department is gonna get the blame regardless

So so many tales I could tell you about this - IT being left out of the project. They can include us in the process, or leave us out. One is by intention, one is by mistake. One gets things done properly, one gets it bodged as a result.

Think is with buying some lower devices, you're literally wasting support time by having techs, staff etc literally WAITING for things to load, boot etc. We've had exactly that with repurposing some of the DFe devices - we've had to compromise as they literally can't run some of the apps because of the low-end spec. All that time spent faffing around by IT trying to get low-end stuff working like high-end stuff is wasted time. Instead of going with the spec IT recommend in the first place. I mean has anyone tried Windows 10 with a HDD these days? Had to wait 20x mins + for one to boot last week. I could have gone for a walk, had a coffee etc in that time.

Most of the DFe stuff was eWaste fresh out of the box due to being so underpowered. A lot have non-replaceable parts too.

We had some trolleys with the built-in charger timer. We set it to charge overnight but people never used it as they never plugged the laptops into the chargers. We simply set it to charge 24/7 in the workplace end to accommodate that but they still hardly plugged them in.

My personal minimum is i5, 8GB RAM, SSD.

Please please PLEASE do NOT buy any Celeron crap without Ethernet ports. We had so many of those sort of sort of spec devices.. Underwhelming Underpowered Barely able to watch a YouTube video But they expected to be able to do video editing on them etc. Such a waste of support time

In one job did the same with the World cup/Euro etc. Some staff wanted to watch it. I didn't. So we swapped shifts etc and I got to leave early one of the days.

Not being sarcastic but serious here - 1) The ability to READ WRITTEN INSTRUCTIONS correctly. 2) Ability to tell that 2x identical looking boxes on the logon screen are actually labelled as username and password NOT email address 3) Reading the FAQs etc we send. 4) The ability for you to realise we're not fobbing you off, but we've wrote all out FAQs, guides etc so as YOU CAN HELP YOURSELF AND GET A QUICKER RESPONSE sometimes by reading those and it's EMPOWERING YOU. Instead of you waiting in the queue for us to get to you, then asking you to load up said guide and follow it with us standing behind you. 5) Understand that IT in schools is mostly severally under-invested and understaffed, that sometimes the IT "department" consists of ONE PERSON. 6) That the complaints you make we've heard before and are likely not the direct result of IT decisions. But IT being IGNORED, sidelined or not involved in the process and having to pick up the pieces of other departments. 7) Understanding #6 that WE WANT to help you, sometimes our hands are tied on WHAT WE CAN DO. Whether that be time, resources, etc

Tell 'em NO and to put it back how it was. Otherwise the item, priority delivery plus labour get recharged to that department

+1 this. Spent time in the past doing videos, how-to's etc only for Google to change the GUI, render my guide out of day - but due to changing roles etc no time to update the guide.