Tallwood_6

Save the school some money and yourself some hassle and get someone in to implement a vanilla setup (might be worth speaking with your LA). If you do decide to go the CC4 route you will need to decent spec machines from the outset (upgrading RAM is a cheap sensible option anything less that 1gb in will struggle), as well as a reasonably beefy server as CC4 can be reasonably demanding even on a smaller network.

Have you tried just giving the AP's some static IP's?

Have to aggree many large organistaions use SUSE Open Enterprise Server with groupwise and Zenworks which will do everything a windows server setup will do and more.

It would seem that you would have to purchase the box set. I'm sure a clean install is possible if it detects a previous 10.5 install or you otherwise have the disk.

The good thing about the mac upgrades is that pricing will likely remain even after release unlike windows 7 which starts out cheap and is gradually getting more and more expensive pre christmas holiday rush.

exactually the same thinking, i have a 320 to go in mine before i do the upgrade, couldnt quite afford the a 500gb but hopfully i should see a little bit of a speed boast over the old 160gb unit which is now practically full.

Pre ordered mine this earlier, family pack is only £39 which is pretty reasonable.

What isnt mentioned though is that apple do offer some pretty generous discounts to students especially in the states where the aim is to get young professionals working on a Mac's. Ultimately though i think the fear is a low cost netbook style Mac would cheapen the brand and hurt profit margins.

Indeed, anyone that has ever had to open up and emac or imac will know what i mean. Nightmare!

Because the guts are not stuffed deep inside the same base as the monitor, imac style and if the screen pokes out you can just attach a new one, and of course you have the option of detaching the base unit as well if you would like and putting it somewhere else if you require. The lenovo units are also screwless and open up so you can get to everything inside nice and easy.

Both Lenovo and HP do All in One mounts which you can attach a screen and mount one of there Ultra small form factor units into a nice PC with a small footprint. They are not quite as eligant as the Dell Studio One but they will be much much easier to work on.

Toms hardware have a pretty good review on Beamforming N Wifi between a few different vendors. Guess who comes out on top by quite some margin. Beamforming: The Best WiFi You’ve Never Seen : Open-Mouthed Amazement Whats even better is i have a load of 7962's waiting to go in.

Yes you tell Capita they should be spending there time vailidating SIM's for an operating system that only just out the door so all those techys with Win 7 love can run it on there desktops and leave the bug fixes for the next release

It will be interesting to see how the 64bit dilemma will be handled, i suspect they will put it off for as long as possible. Ultimately though as you say the in place upgrade which they are so fond of wont be possible and some kind of new migration process will have to be developed to get the postgres database etc off onto a new box. Alot of code to look at for RM and i suspect they will probably end up dropping alot of legacy CC3 stuff such as printer credits.

I could understand a router or firewall but not a switch in its default settings. Our 5412zl doesn't which is essentially the same switch.

Firmware update? I'd be surprised if it is blocking WOL packets though

We shall see about Win 7 they might say christmas but i bet something will put it back, not that i'm really that worried about having windows 7 straight away but i would like to start seeing 2K8R2 or at least 2003 64bit supported on CC4.

This doesnt really change the fact that the OS is not even at general release yet, i dont even think the major software titles like CS4 officially support windows 7 yet. Everyone is getting a little ahead of themselves i think, this suddern rush by a number of sites to start deploying it isnt something Capita was likely to expect given that it probably wont be croping up in business's for little a while yet.

Yes but you can't really reliably test and develop for an OS in beta, microsoft could have potentially made a number of substantial changes to the OS before release if they felt like it. Yes its probably prudent for them to have done some limited testing but you cant divert resources to a project when you cant guarentee the scope.

So would anyone with CC4, while everyone else plays with Server 2008 R2 and windows 7 all RM's customers are stuck with server 2003 and XP SP2 and vista sp1 for the forseable future. I think it will all be getting ripped out and replaced with vanilla next summer unless RM sort there act out.

Should be smoother, still runs like crap on the stations even with SR1

No completely new version of Mac OSX so you will need to purchase new media and licenses, i'm not completely sure about pricing but its looking to be pretty cheap judging by the US pricing i've seen. I'm not sure about features other than the fact its supposed to be leaner than 10.5 and be completely 64bit, you wont be able to run it on powerpc Mac's.

Sounds like they should have taken a copy of your database weeks ago and done some proper investigation. Would have taken them know time at all and would have saved both you and support loads of grief.

For all the Serco support woes we have had SIM's and CMIS and without a shadow of a doubt CMIS is far more intuative and easy to manage and above all customise to a schools needs. Yes the admin interface isn't quite as good but i dont have to run around stations reinstalling or upgrading and by all accounts its getting moved into completely web based interface as we speak. Yes SIM's might be moving in the same direction but i'll bet a large sum of money that Serco will do a far better job of it. With regards to your support problems much like RM you end up speaking with second line support the vast majority of the time and if they cannot sort it, it sits in a queue for 3rd line to eventually look at or feed info back to second line. If you can get hold of a member of 3rd line or implimentation they shuold be of vastly more help.

I've never found them all that great to be honest. Are you trying to get them to help with a fresh facility/eportal install? I know from experience they much perfer that they carry the initial install themselves.