Ephelyon

Price. With a decent touch-interactive UST projector and drywipe board, you get: * A room done for about £1,600 (if you include some cheap but decent speakers); * A normal board that can be used when the projector's not on (makes a huge difference to how you can lay out a classroom); * An interactive surface that can be used even when the computer's off (if for some reason you didn't want to just write on the board); * Replacement bulbs only £50 a pop; Personally I can't see why any schools are choosing to spend double that for something without any of those advantages (fair enough no bulbs, but you'd have to replace a lot of bulbs to even cover the difference in price)...

The reality check here is that, in life, everyone expects everyone else to have a crystal ball... which is odd because we all know how much of a myth that is. The reality is that passing the buck has never solved anything for anyone. Where service provision is concerned, the collaboration between supplier and deliverer is paramount. Staff on the ground in schools need to know there is a way of doing things that the vendor can officially approve; they also need to know that a universal approach delivers exactly what it says on the tin. On the other hand, supplier representatives need to know when things are going wrong on the ground so they can generate - and issue widely - the guidance that supports those staff on the ground to get things done. If necessary, they can issue clarifications, but not before they've had sufficient representation among the customer base, which individual forum posts will not amount to - in a business sense - just by themselves. The fact remains that the Capita Group is a very large entity - and thinking at that scale does take some effort! - that needs to respond to customer demand based on feedback that is both measured and measurable. Considering the market share of the SIMS product, we know that the education of children could be impacted if things aren't done properly... but then we all share a responsibility in our respective positions to ensure that this does not happen! We just have to work together.

If you mean the EB-595Wi (which we've just got our first of, as demo'd last BETT), you can find it cheaper here.

Just out of interest, and obviously without mentioning suppliers... roughly how much does Windows Server Datacenter licensing cost per host? Thinking we might switch to that model here, regardless of the hypervisor platform...

We use DataWreck.

We've used SplashTop for this with a VI student in the past.

This is all very true

Just bought the 840 for my iMac.

I'd argue maybe you can't do all that much without the school dev plan, but there are still some generic infrastructure development priorities you can list in the meantime until you get it (never hurts to look busy, especially when the Govs are involved). Things like when the next server/client OS upgrade is due; how old various bits of kit are; how your platform stands in terms of physical, virtual or a hybrid; where do you stand with backup and (off-site?) DR etc... some of this is impacted by broader planning at school/county level, but you can still make some inroads for now. It gets the juices going and puts questions like "Do we need to talk to IT about putting some wireless in this new extension?" in the backs of people's minds if you've already got something in the works to show them at planning meetings.

If your budget is tight, you could look at RealSmart.

There's also this computer GPO setting for workstations/servers: Administrative Templates > System > User Profiles > Delete cached copies of roaming profiles.

One does not simply walk into Mordor.

It does matter if they're using programmes that reference absolute file paths (sometimes by share, not by drive mappings). We've had this recently with Mediator; students using this to create websites experience problems when the absolute file paths they've referenced no longer work when something is moved. Should they be being taught that way? No. But this is the real world...

That's good; you're in one of those environments that doesn't seem to suffer from an extended logon time if you FSRM it then. We did here though. It would be interesting if someone could do some research on this. As far as I'm aware, the principle is that Windows will try to create the file, be told it's not allowed to, and then apply the "continuous retry until limit is exceeded" approach. Another example of this can be found in the RoboCopy command, which by default will retry a file copy operation one million times, waiting thirty seconds between each, unless it's told otherwise - so you really want to add "/r:0 /w:0" to any RoboCopy command you execute! But what's behind this? Could it be that some members, rather than simply working in an environment where a longer logon time isn't considered noteworthy, have in fact set some obscure (GPO?) setting somewhere that tells Windows not to bother retrying a file creation operation if it's not successful the first time, and that those members are consequently not seeing a problem when using FSRM to fix the desktop.ini issue?

That's fine for new setups, but if you've already got a folder structure set up for users it means either moving stuff around yourself or sending e-mails explaining why something like that has changed and which sub-folder new documents will be stored in by default from now on. Special schools with lots of autistic students might find that tricky as they often can't stand change. I remember the hoo-hah when we changed the default home page one time. Or you could just do this in 30 seconds and not have the hassle in an existing setup.

What would that be?

That entry isn't deleting the file; it's deleting the offending line in it that causes the apparent renaming during logon. The rest is still there, so you get the custom Documents icon but the name stays the same.

A number of solutions have been proposed to the desktop.ini problem (where all home folders display as "Documents" instead of the username), but I've just discovered another one I wanted to share. Can't see any disadvantages to it as yet. Essentially it's an Ini Files user preference like so: Tested working over here. Anyone have any thoughts?

Good shout, but if I were buying them in bulk I'd have to fit them all myself then...

Sounds good. I might be getting back to you on that score then.

Give @ICTDirect_Dave a call. When I was last looking at their HP DL585 G6 pricing, we were able to get something like 24 cores, 128GB RAM and 3TB storage in RAID10 for about £1,325/unit.

@ICTDirect_Dave, could we get those with a lovely 120GB SSD in for £350?

Please could you post the anticipated salary range as per forum rules? I may well be interested in this one.

"Low-cost", though. Quality costs money.

I think you're correct in that it could grammatically be taken to mean that, but realistically nobody would interpret it as such. You could find an amusing way to work it into a response if said tablet-peddlers start harassing you of course.