Spitfire

If you pause the picture or have static backgrounds then go for LCD as plasma suffer from "Plasma burn" where eventually the screen becomes burnt with images. The higher the "contrast" number the better, the best are acheiving 20000 at the moment. There are supposedly only 3 factories producing LCD screens so take your pick from the manufacturers but "Samsung" are the leaders in this field. Rumour has it Plasma will not exist in a couple of years time, all down to costs.

Surely the site is for all Educational IT professionals not just you school techs, about time some of you grew up and acted sensible just like us College techs. Or if you can't take a joke you shouldn't have joined...

We purchased a new "Helpdesk" package and log everything on it ,we then started producing stats from it, we also let the stupid little jobs pile up. We were soon appreciated a bit more and it eventualy stopped the stupid jobs coming in. Work your contracted hours only and go out for your lunch break, I go and sit in my car and have my sandwiches, mobile switched off. They soon get the point.

Microsoft changed the terms of the "Campus Agreement" very quietly over the summer and now it is illegal to install College or School software on home computers, however there is an arrangement where Staff can purchase their own licence for about £16, you need to set this up with Microsoft. We had 2 of our Techs sacked for releasing the Product Licensing Key to 3rd parties (i.e. Staff) during the summer break. Be warned.

Regedt32 HKEY_USERS Default Control Panel Desktop Wallpaper This is where the default wallpaper is picked up, this needs to read C:\windows\(yourlogo).bmp where "yourlogo" is the desktop of your choice The current users are found in the same place but in the HKEY_CURRENT_USERS

Deep Freeze used here on all our "outreach" laptops.

We use HelpSTAR 9.0, good all round facilities, hard and software assset management, web based access for users, good support from firm.

Staff 5Gbs Students 200Mbs All monitored and controlled by SpaceGuard

We've tried every trick in the book and had no success, all our CS3 installs have had to be done seperately after imaging. Just a thought though we've had other software that writes to the application data folder in "all users "and we have had to give "all users" full control to the folder there.

we have loads of laptops that drop of the network, the usual problem is the windows zero configuration stops, restart this service and then tick the box to allow windows to manage the network connection.

Don't go for Plasma get a LCD instead more robust plus no screen burn with a static picture, a video splitter box could be your answer depending on the display. All our displays are fed by the network we used "Onelan" for the computer and software.

Could it be that it's looking for a mapped drive that is no longer there?

We've had loads of problems like this, mostly on data projectors and usually it's down to the user changing the refresh rate in the advance settings of the display properties.

We are running about 150 laptops, going up to 400 soon. We use "Lapsafe" storage and charging trolleys, we have 6 in use at the moment and more to come as "laptops" are the in thing here this week, depending on the model they can hold upto 30 laptops, get the ones with the charging units included then you don't have to use the individual laptop chargers, as that's a real pain. 3Com OfficeConnect wap, easy to setup and use. All our printing is networked , so no problems there.

Share the printer as normal, either networked or a dedicated computer printer, on any other computer install as a local printer and create a new "local port", point it to the printer either by the share name or it's ip address, you will of course have to install the correct driver. Now anyone who logs on to the computer can use the printer. Always disable the bi-directional. This is how we manage all our printers and we have many, many.

We've done a trial run and found it takes forever to run this update, had no problems with bugs or compatbility, if you run the updates to all software you're talking about 1:30 to 2 hours. Was it worth it,only if you've got time to waste.