CM786

I have just bought loads of TravelMate 2400 series laptops and they are supposed to have a 4.5hour battery life. Currently I am luckly to get 1.30hours out of them! They are still new however, so I am hoping that with a few charges/discharges they will get close to their full capacity!

How would upgrades/uninstallation work?

If they ever say they need an independent educational consultant to come in - I think a cheque to EduGeek Consutancy should be in order The existing PCs in the suite are NEC PowerMates and 4 have died with PSU issues. I ended up just transfering them to normal PC cases and using a standard PSU to get them working. They already have 128Mb of Ram so another 512Mb and a general clean up I think they should be fine for the classrooms. The really *poor* stuff is in the classroom already. The old ICT Coordinator got her husband to build PCs for the school and they are just bits cobbled together (most are Duron 600Mhz - 800Mhz) but with only 128Mb of Ram. With the right investment I still think these could be of use. Got no record of if the existing OS (Win98 is even licensed!) Unfortunetly they have already agreed to the whiteboards - a decision I was not involved in,. To be honest when I wrote my report I wasn't expecting anything much to come of it, since I know the whiteboards will cost them serious cash, but credit to the Chair of Governors for seeing the link between buying whiteboards and needing something to run them on! He does work for an Aerospace company so is quite technical! They currently have two - one on an old Mesh PC that was bought in 2000 (now has selotape for the CD drive ) which is a Duron 800Mhz and its just very very poor. I have already mentioned how different Office 2007 looks, but the Chair of Governors still wants to stick with Office 2003 (I think because he uses it at work all the time). However I will give him a few screenshots of Office 2003/2007/OpenOffice: I could even give each member of staff a copy of OpenOffice on CD for them to install on their home PCs so that they become used to it quickly! Surely they can't be expected to download it themselves? What I would LOVE to do would be to replace the old 14" CRTs with 17" TFTs (dreaming now!) on the PCs I would upgrade. I know it wouldn't make a difference speed wise, but from a user point of view they seem to think that the PC feels faster and if it looks more attractive, its more likely to be used. In another of my schools all new PCs are black/silver with nice TFTs and the kids fight to use them! Can't see finance letting me buy those (maybe next year)..... Looking at the investment planner now - cheers mark.

Do you have "Enable Classic Shell" turned on in Group Policy? If so, any enable Active Desktop group policy won't work.

From all the great advice its obvious that this kind of situation is not uncommon. Some absolutely brillant ideas. The only issue with showing them other schools is time. The school closes in about 3 weeks, and I REALLY need to get stuff ordered and delivered asap because nobody is in the office during the summer and I don't usually work during the summer hols, but obviously with this amount of work to do I will have to. I love the idea about duty of care, disposal costs, and INVESTING (not buying ) I am not wasting any PCs (all decent PCs being upgraded to 512Mb), but with some of the really bad ones a Thin Client is a great idea - however I would need time to look into this properly and don't think I will get this setup for September. I have suggested saving about £2k in licensing using OpenOffice.org, but teachers are not keen and niether is the chair of governors - even though I showed them OpenOffice opening Office documents. Can't blame them really I suppose. Do Becta have some kind of minimum spec for PCs? Would be good to shock them! Thanks for everything, I'll get some ideas over the weekend and I will report back on Tuesday with the result.

That made me chuckle - all the server does is hold the files for a peice of software called Smart Learning - THATS IT! So imagine the school with about 80 PCs and no centralised DC way of locking them down/no shared storage/no decent reliable printers and a technican (me!) that is only in for two half days a week. I have another school where the environment is totally different and staff members enjoy using their PCs and thats because my ideas for hardware upgrading/general things have been taken onboard. I would love to show them round the school. Then recenlty got "out standing" from Ofsted for their ICT and the head/ICT Coordinator have said I was a big part of this ( (Swells big head back down!)). I want to do the same at this other school now. I need a finance head on! Could say that if the existing PCs stay in place then they won't even be worth using with low-end task and it would cost us to get rid of them? £50 per PC sounds right... The printer sells its self.... can play up the virues doing the rounds too.....god I feel like a cheap sales man . shouldn't really have to resort to this, but the head and ICT Coordinator are not very "IT"...lol

Hi guys, To cut a long story short... One of the schools that I visit is in abit of a bad state IT wise. I got fed up with the lack of action by both the head teacher and ICT Coordinator that I conducted my own technical assessment and found that frankly they were very poor with most PCs 6+ years old (as excepted) and the staff generally expecting things NOT TO WORK and seeing IT as a "bother". I showed this to the Head Teacher and ICT Coordinator and they bascially said, "um....right....don't know what all that means...but we will pass it on to the Chair of Governors to have a look" The chair came in to see me because all concerned were impressed by the contents of my report and went through my proposals. He said he was shocked at why nothing was done in previous years- I'm not going to start blaming on a public forum, but he said that if he can get the finance committe to agree he can take the money I have requested from Devaulved Capital and I can have my improvements. The finance committee is meeting on Monday so I need some strong arguements which he can use to convince them. I am looking for 13K! What really annoyed me is that the schools ofsted said that the use of IT in classrooms/generally is poor. So their plan is to buy an Interactive Whiteboard for every classroom as if they are a magic fix - but then what is the point when the class PCs are decrepid old beighg boxes running with Windows 95/98? SmartBoard software will run like **** and then the staff will lose confidence it and that is loads of money wasted. Problems (very brief since the report would give a few things away about the school) - Obsolete Hardware in need of Refresh - Obsolete Curriculum PC Server (9Gb HDD, 128Mb Ram :oops: ) - Lack of Operating System Consistency - No Centrally Assigned Computer Security - No centralised storage - No AntiVirus Software 8O - Poor Software Licensing management in the past - Slow and Costly Colour Printing in ICT Suite - SEN Pupils no support - Lack of scope for future development (my other schools are looking into Digital Video/Animation/Video Cenferencing - here they haven't even got 2 PCs with the same word processing package due to dodgy licensing! My mini action plan is: 1. Buy New PCs for Junior IT Suite 2. Buy New Server for IT Suite 3. Upgrade and repair old PCs in Junior IT Suite and place in Classrooms 4. Deploy Windows XP on all curriculum PCs 5. Setup Old Server as WSUS or Mail Server 6. Dispose of old classroom PCs beyond useful life or economic repair. Any machines that are still useful to be cleaned up, upgraded to Windows XP, converted to Server clients and placed back into classrooms What good arguements can he use to help me get my 13K from the finance people? Will these people care about benefits like PCs that work, sharing of work, shared calanders, proper user tracking, etc or will cold hard cash be what they are most interested in? Any thing general even that I could adapt is fine... I want to paint the image that the the school is falling behind unless they act which is true. Thanks, CM786

Congratulations. Had that with a school I was at. Trouble is the following year the council cut their budget because they were no longer in special measures and it meant less for me to spend on ICT and the poor caretaker had his hours cut... Hope its not the same with you.

If your not sure what make your motherboard is (and you don't have the time/inclination to open your PC up), then I recommend using this: http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html It does a complete audit along with Motherboard Make and Model.

Have a look at: http://www.cdnnetworks.com I have used them loads with no problems in over ten schools and about 50 installations over the last two years. Great service too.

Just had chance to try making a few shortcuts on another machine in another school - but with a very similar setup. On this network it doesn't matter if the shortcut target field is greyed out or not, both shortcuts work instantly. Pic attached (just to try! )

Long weekend eh?!?! Nah mate.... only vist that school half-a-day a week so won't get back in their until Tuesday unfortunetly. 8) Thanks again.... really hope it works, then I can enjoy the football again without this at the back on my mind. :oops:

Cheers Ric! I shall try in on Tuesday and report back!

I just copied them from a local machine onto the server share. I did look at the properties and the target field was greyed out?? Which means?? :oops:

Hi Mark, Yep... brand new user and I don't use Roaming Profiles either. After somemore reading I thought it might have something to do with the switch in the comms cabinete,but that has just been replaced with a new 48-port Netgear one with a gig uplink to the server........so its not that. hmm...

Hi guys, This is a strange one. Just been setting up a new network where in theory everything should just fly along. The Server - AMD X2 Dual Core, 2Gb Ram, 36Gb WD Rapter HDD for Redirected Start Menus/Desktop. Another 36Gb WD Rapter HDD for the OS (Server 2003 x64bit) and a 250Gb Seagate SATA2 drive for storage. Clients - Biostar IDEQ N1 Small Form Factor, Nforce Chipset, AMD Sempron 64Bit 2800+, 512Mb DDR400 Ram, 80Gb SATA HDD and Windows XP SP2. (as you can see I prefer AMD ) I have used group policy to redirect the start menu/desktop/my documents for all users (currently just one user called ITSuite) in the IT Suite. All software was installed locally on the clients before they joined the domain. I just copied the local shortcuts to the installed software and put them on on the redirected start menu share on the server. Problem I have is that when a client logs in, and selects a program from the start menu, it takes almost a minute before the application starts up. Its like something is blocking them???? Not sure how to describe it. I copied the shortcuts from the redirected start menu to the local client machines C:\ while logged into the domain and all MS Office applications (which seems to be the main ones with the problem) come on instantly - no delay or hold up. Definetly seems to be a problem the server config?? But I can't think what?? I thought it was a group policy problem (windows installer being disabled) but after enabling it, the shortcuts to the applications stored on the server via the redirected start menu are still slow, yet the shortcuts to the programs via the local start menu (after I allowed the local start menu to appear) work instantly. What is going on?? This happened yesterday and I am now not back at the school until next week - but its annoying me and I kept thinking about this all last night even when watching the Spain Vs France game (god....I'm sad! :oops: ) The only change I have made is add a new group policy called "Student Wallpaper" that (well obviously) adds a nice wallpaper and in order to get this working I disabled the option in my "Student Lockdown" GPO to force classic shell. I just don't think it is group policy related. Just hope its a simple fix. Teachers have not noticed yet which is quite amusing... Help please.. Thanks, CM786 The

Just to update. In the end I used: http://www.petri.co.il/killpol.htm Killpol - This tool enables you to temporarily remove policy restriction for the current user. Works for me!

This looks useful and I think what DMcCoy as getting at: http://www.theeldergeek.com/gp07.htm

I didn't think this thread had been posted since IE6 crashed when I clicked on the Submit button.... glad it worked however! Thanks for the link bossman, just checking it out now.

Hi guys, I have seen this somewhere but now I don't seem to be able to find it? I am setting up some laptops (no domain controller) and I want to restrict the "students" account on them. I know that if I change the local group policy (gpedit.msc from Run) it will affect both the Admin account ("ITAdmin") and the student account. I only want the group policy to affect the student account. I read about a crude workaround to this ages ago.. but now cannot find it?? Thanks for any help. CM786

From the sounds of it - its not exactly good? If it is working fine, then it sounds like I shouldn't touch it (well not for the moment - its not a priority) and just leave it on NT4??

Hi guys, Today I visited a school that want to upgrade from a Windows 98/NT4 Server platform to an XP/Server 2003 setup. They have 3 servers. - NT4 Server (Domain) - Curriculum - NT4 Server - Admin - Mail Server running something called iLibra. The mail server is the thing that I have a question about. I have never heard of it, but a quick look on the net brings http://www.tameside.gov.uk/schools_grid/faqs/ilibra_faq.htm Seems to be a tameside specific package. If anyone has used it I'd just like to know; 1/ Can it be run on a Windows Server 2003 Platform? 2/ Does it store email accounts in a database that can be migrated to something else? 3/ Anyone have any setup documentation for it? 4/ Is it any good? Thanks, CM786

If its Mono laser then have a look at what I just orderd: http://www.pcwb.com/catalogue/item/LEXPR689 I normally do not like Lexmark but for £74 (after ringing up) it seems a bargain. The reviews look good too. Typically for a Lexmark the consumables will be more then the competiton but I have bought it for use with a laptop trolley so I don't expect it to get hammered like in the IT Suite. It seems I am looking at £40 for a 2000 page toner cartridge after a quick look on the net.

I thought that geeks knew nothing about football?? To be fair however, I've been to Liverpool a few times (to see friends) and found it to be a top place with the friendliest people I've ever met! Its a Capital of Culture and all that too! (Is that enough to escape being hunted down!?) :twisted:

Congratulations! I hope you're still going to be updating your blog! Its a great read and you really do portray your NM as a complete idiot! But then he's a Liverpool fan so what do you expect! runs and hides It must be so satisfying to know that you no longer have to work with him!