Tallwood_6

True most of the Sonys are designed to look like a Mac anyway and often cost just as much. If you can track down the specific parts then looking on the manufactures website will often get you more up to date drivers i.e intel for network cards, graphics etc, synaptics for touch pad drivers etc, instead of all direct from sony.

Got a 5412zl here much like all the procurve switches its works flawlessly. Have looked at Extreme before and found the procurves's at the time offered a better feature set and warrenty for the money. That said i know of one site near to us that has had problems running 10gig between several 5412zl's but i put that more down to the poor fiber links.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/532552560.png

Cant quite see how the firmware can be remotely compromised without some kind of user interaction, especially if the HIDFirmwareUpdaterTool has to run and know info is given on how a remote attacker might get access to the logged info remotely.

CMIS do a completely web based version for primarys which is supposed to be comming to secondarys in the not to distance future.

Yes Netgear use the technology under licence from Ruckus after they Rckus filled a lawsuit against them a year or so ago and forced to pay Ruckus Royalities after infrindging patents. I'd imagine that Ruckus probably do use some atheros chipsets along with a whole host other others including, HP, Cisco, Colubris, Trapeze etc.

Would stand to reason i thought it was a patented technology.

I'm not sure where you get your facts from with regards to not being able to use softxpand we have a local reseller that has softxpand working with some success on CC3 and i have trialed it out on CC4 and although i couldnt get it running 100% in the limited time i had it i'm pretty sure with a little more time i could get it working reasonably well, or be it without some of the RM rubbish. I have advised them to speak to RM and possibly invest in a virtual CC3/CC4 network to help with future developments. You might be more locked down with RM software wise but you are almost as locked down hardware wise with softxpand. I know the machines offered to us feature 3x PCI express on the motherboard with dual graphics, not the kind of spec your likely to get from and OEM.

Except the Ruckus AP's offer multipath, beamflex MIMO or whatever you wanna call it from the standard b/g AP upwards.

When i say the Ruckus is very very easy to setup i mean the inital setup takes about 5 minutes and the interface is very user friendly and far from intimidating for those with a limited skill set. I did trial out other solutions before hand aruba in particular i had for a month and yes once all setup it is plug and play on the AP front but config took much longer and want nearly as user friendly. This is something worth bareing in mind if like me you have a couple of other techs that are using the interface as time is money.

That is largely my concern, and also future OS's support and licencing issues.

Price HP vs Ruckus AP for AP isn't the only consideration if the HP AP's dont offer the same kind of coverage and speed untimately you will end up paying more. What also hasnt been said is the Ruckus kit is very very straightforward to setup and manage. If CSE is confident in its claims then it will give you some demo kit to run side by side with some ruckus, aruba, meru etc.

Looked at the controller for our 5400 but its far to expensive, i do like the procurve kit but its wireless gear just doesnt stack up to the competition like its switches. Shame really as it would have been a much more elegant solution as now we are slowly getting shot of the HP access points as they cant handle the growing number of wireless clients.

We have 420 and 530 AP's and ruckus. The HP stuff i've never had a problem with but the ruckus gives much better coverage, the 530 AP's are highly configurable and give the best coverage of the Procurve AP's i've come across but they are a pain to deploy on mass.

Its all about better managing the amount of bandwith available, take a look at your network utilization on a normal desktop over the course of the day as i sit here typing this its at 0% unless all your clients are copying across the network and streaming video constantly its not going to be a problem. I mean our internet connection is 10mbps and even with 1200 kids and 500 desktops this rairely gets saturated. If i get the opertunity over the summer i will set a number of laptops and install speedflex and get you some figures but i think the only way to satisfy your interest is to get some eval kit and test for yourself.

The difference we see even with the more basic Ruckus ZoneFlex 2942 over the likes of the Procurve 420 and Procurve 530 units we currently have is substantial. If you can afford an 802.11n then go for it you will get even better coverage with units like the Ruckus ZoneFlex 7962 and probably save more money in the long run.

We have a couple of the Dual Channel N ZoneFlex 7962 two of these will do 120 laptops.

We have both the M58 usff and sff and DC7900 sff and mini tower and theres not alot of difference the lenovo seem a little better built though and i've had some iffy power supplies in the HP's.

Acer Aspire Revo R3600 Desktop PC - Desktops at Ebuyer looks to be one of the better Atom nettops.

I would personally wait until more of the ion models hit the market, the current crop lack the graphics grunt required for many tasks. I'm personally not all to convinced by the nettop idea, often you can get some lower powered desktops either brand new of refurbished for not much more and they are far more serviceable, have room for an optical drive and should last a good while longer.

Its abit of an office XP to 2003 type of upgrade, i've just licenced for 2007 its cheap at the moment when the office 2010 select licences are out you will be paying another £10 per machine i suspect.

Office 2010 is not due until around March next year, 2007 select licence prices have come down abit now as well.

Unless these machines are using some decent SATA drives and they are getting really hammered, IDE Emulation is fine, haven't noticed much of a difference on the HP dc7900 we have here using ACHI and it proved a pain getting it working with windows PE.

Looks more than up to the job for a 100 machines, RAM's cheap i stick in 8 and install 2003/8 enterprise.

Its standard set so providing you give both the Netgear's and procurves a firmware update beforehand they should be ok. You may want to use LACP though.