NB9457

It just doesn't sound appealing to me! Aha

Although not very secure, a way round is to make an account with permissions for those drives or use the staff member's credentials and get them to map via a batch file or powershell script very time you log on to the PC. Used to do it at a few primary schools, just make sure you let them know it's not overly secure but will do the job!

As already said, make sure you use a microfibre, they're silly cheap and make life a hell of a lot easier!

Good ol' fashioned tea from a kettle here for us! Not posh enough for fancy machinery

Are bot wireless networks named the same with the same credentials? It may not like roaming between the two, so if that's case, name them slightly differently, I had to do this at a friends house, fixed a few issues

If you got the data of and whatnot, I'd strongly recommend replacing it, these machines are old now so I'd look at replacing it with something new for reliability and warranty purposes, maybe try ICT Direct for a budget refurb with warranty? If for whatever reason you really need that server repaired best bet is eBay, probably pick one up for around £50.

We replace HDDs and PSUs for fun here! My cut off point for 'old' hardware is Core2, if anything below that now breaks, be it PSU or HDD, I use it as an excuse to bin them as P4s, Atoms and Pentium Ds have well and truly had their time now!

Some of the PCs here run Win10 on Atoms and P4s, if your hardware is this old I wouldn't recommend it, they do struggle, so we are looking at going to Win7 for the remainder of their life.

I've always preferred it for viewing angles, plus response times are great on IPS these days, LG one is 5ms

I know this isn't entirely helpful, but over the years we've tried several Smart projector products and for us, they've always been pretty rubbish, I've noticed this in other schools too, quality is very poor. You sure the glow inside isn't just light escaping from around the lamp's enclosure? It will look more orange within projector as they're different to your normal halogen lamps, most are arc/gas lamps

What kind of environment is the switch going in? I've fitted a few Netgear and DLink switches over the past few years and I don't really have a bad word to say about them for the price.

Yup, so easy to use and a lot can be done by the GUI. They are a tad on the loud end though, so it may be an issue if it's going into a room or office.

Ultra wide curved is the way forward, they're so nice! LG have this offering, well within your budget at around £260! LG 29UC88 - 29" Curved IPS LED Monitor

What do you mean by busy? As long as clients are connected and on or have WOL set up, the switches will always show activity via the lights on the ports. If you think there's an issue try some network monitoring software or see if the switch has any monitoring in the control panel, but if you aren't having issues, I wouldn't worry.

Our new build had the bells tied into the fire alarm, the difference between a fire drill and class change was very easy to recognise, slightly different tone patterns and obviously a fire alarm doesn't stop! And the regular fire drills ensure it all works. Although I never understood why they chose to use the fire alarm for class change when they had a site wide PA too, always found it a bit odd as a class change over the PA is much nicer to listen to!

We don't work in the same school do we?! In exactly the same boat at a High School, our newest machines are touching on 5 years old now, with P4s still in use, beyond a joke!

Definitely damaged screens

Users Users Users The systems and equipment are all fine, most our issues tend to be between the keyboard and chair

Get a GTX1060! One of the best bang for buck cards out at the moment.

Who owns them? If you are responsible for management of them regardless of ownership, I'd set the same restrictions as all the other students, if they don't like this for whatever reason, I'd make them sign a little waiver saying the school is not responsible if the child stumbles across any material they shouldn't. As far as I'm concerned, if I am ever asked to manage anything, safeguarding is always a number 1 priority, no exceptions.

We get Cat5 to USB adapters, allow runs of up to 60M. Search for them on Google

Is it the SmartBoards causing it and have the PCs been replaced at all recently? We've had similar and it's been due to the cable going to the board being over 5M. Issue was fixed by going Cat5 or getting a powered USB hub, depending on the length of cable.

One school where the IT Suites are looked after, we use Microsoft or Logitech mice, whichever are cheaper at the time, around £4 each but never seem to fail, just the odd one damaged every few weeks. Another school on the other hand, get at least 4 vandalised or stolen mice a day, so we bought the cheapest USB optical mice we could (they even have a scroll whell!), came in about 80p each and bought around £200 worth to hopefully last us into next year!

NComputing I must say is very good for the price and easy to manage, just make sure you have enough resources, RAM especially, things like chrome and whatnot will still be resource hungry. Try make sure in the server, there is 2GB per client and then a bit for headroom. Also run the NComputing server on SSDs if you can, that will make things quick for not a lot of money.

If you're doing new cable runs, I'd say you may as well, but I'd also keep VGA too. If I were just swapping a projector and keeping the screen and so on, I'd keep VGA for the time being and use an adapter for those who require HDMI