El_Nombre

(I just noticed this reply - thanks. I'll give you a bell later on.) Downloaded and ran the first .exe from http://www.espresso.co.uk/support/files/codec/ Worked like an absolute charm - thanks! Delighted.

We had this before also where a ram slot has been hosed. Took me a fair bit of head scratching to discover that one.

Hi helpful guys and gals... Absolutely out of ideas with this one. We bought Clipbank a little while ago and, with no recognisable patterns, a few machines just aren't playing nice with it. Have put the shortcut in Ranger, Windows Media Ruiner, I mean Player, is installed and working on the machines. However, when a teacher logs on and tries to play a video file the little flash preview works fine and with sound, but actually clicking on it to play the video itself opens the page and spits out the error message: "Windows has blocked this software because it can't verify the publisher. Name: ocget.dll Publisher: Unknown Publisher" And then the video plays but with no sound. So, I go into Ranger Admin for a rummage and under the All Computers policy I elect the option to allow ocget.dll. Log back in as a teacher and same old message and no sound still. BUT this doesn't happen as administrator; entering the IP address of the clipbank server to get into and play the clip it all works just as it should. I'm stumped with it so I thought I'd see if anyone had any ideas. Something in Group Policy I've not seen? Thanks in advance for reading.

Phwooaaarrrr!. Only messing, good effort. We've not taken the plunge or experimented or even talked about experimenting here with 7. Likely we'll stick with XP for the long haul, or maybe run it out to one of the more capable rooms... Hmmm... ...Dammit, got me thinking now...

I had to wait WEEKS before I heard my first Heath Ledger joke last year, and a fair few days before my first Jeremy Beadle one. I'm confident a Michael Jackson joke will arrive before Monday. x 1000

We run Cubase and Sibelius here on four PCs with a variety of interfaces, monitoring setups and plugin packages, all recording projects to a NAS (as kids aren't allowed access to the C drive and their home areas would fill up.) Works a treat.

Absolutely well worth bearing in mind. Yes, we have recently started to enforce new measures against vandalism and new room allocation guidelines are being put into place. We hope this will at least limit the damage, but it won't be avoided entirely. Billing is also something we're working on. Some teachers are better at enforcing this than others though it has to be said. Our results may vary I think. In the 'dodgier' rooms though (which may well be due for upgrade sometime) I'll be all for fitting the toughest PCs I can find along with a few ED209s. The problem of banning is one I'm sure a million of us have faced, and banning for vandalism isn't something we'll look at too hard. It's all too easy to bypass us with "How can I teach if X is banned?" which is indeed a valid point. I'll leave the portioning of punishment to the heads and department heads who are more than capable so long as damage is reported promptly and treated seriously, which is now about to start happening with great vengeance and furious anger. I often wondered at registering kids at computers for lessons... Of course, we can see who logged on where with Ranger but if it becomes open and shut enough within a lesson to see that a mouse is missing or a keyboard has swearwords on it by the end and John Smith was registered on the machine it can be reported immediately and dealt with then and there, rather than half-remembered and part of a landslide vandalism repair day with no fingers to point. Still, anything in registering kids to machines? I'm about to go off my own topic here though...

Thanks everyone. We're currently in the process of 'cracking down', and lessons are being learned from last year when we simply ran too low on budget to buy mice and keyboards to throw into the grinder. Cheers for the advice. I don't think we'll be buying any toughbooks though, and the suggestion of PC Chesham was a good one. I might just get a few of these: http://birmingham.lug.org.uk/irc/ed209.jpg

Hi everyone. As it's just been half-term we've taken a look at the running repairs we need to address here. Our biggest problem is vandalism, mostly to keyboards and mice and the cases of the PCs. Mice and keyboards fair enough are vulnerable to yanking and stabbing and probing of all sorts, but it's the damage to the cases that causes the most worry as a removed drive blank tends to lead to the machine being fed bottles and crisps and drinks and biscuits. Which makes it grumpy. I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations as far as a 'tough' PC goes. Are there any manufacturers or distributors within school-budget (and not military contract) grasp who could supply us a year-8-with-a-biro proof PC or twenty? Does anyone have any models which seem to stand up well anyway? Cheers in advance for any replies.

Do a fair bit of home audio production and send off demos from time to time. No aspirations of fame or anything! Won't see El Nombre on the charts anytime soon. Best CDs I've found are Taiyo Yudens, and burning at half the drive's max speed or less seems to work out best for me. Worst CDs we ever had were these white label Infinity CDs for a batch of 200 EPs we burned ourselves (drives got warm that day. Warm and broken.) 'Orrible things.

I think that's a great idea all round. Do indeed let us know.

Also, on the subject, this is probably the best thing on the internet.

Metallica - Of Wolf and Man Megadeth - She-Wolf Pink Floyd - Dogs of War NB these will frighten the kids. EDIT - and you'll get sued for using the Metallica one.

Yeah I gave that a stab. No joy sadly. I backed up all the files as soon as I got the thing, so they're all safe incase I do have to reinstall. I mean when I have to reinstall.

Oh yes, sorry I did that almost first off. I ran one memory test from a Ubuntu CD and one from a Hiren's Boot CD. Came up ok on both. Toilet. Thanks for the pointer there though! I'm off for a quick cry.

I'm out of ideas on this one. Given a Vista Dell laptop to fix, which bluescreens every time you start normal mode or safe mode. Repair option just restarts it. Bluescreen stop error is 0x0000c1f5. I boot from a Linux recovery CD, ntfs-3g /dev/sda3 /mnt/windows -o force (sda3 is the C: drive judging from ls /mnt/windows.) Went to cd /mnt/windows/\$Extend and then cd \$RmMetadata with ls to display the contents and then deleted the $TxfLog file from C: which is causing the problem. Closed that and restarted. For this process, as I'm new to Linux command line stuff, I was following the instructions here. Rebooted into the Vista DVD and repair, restart, and instead of loading perfectly it scrolls a bit, then tosses up a BLACK screen of death with: !!0x0000034!! 248/91553 (_0000000000000000.cdf-ms) Clutching at straws, ran a chkdsk /r which didn't fix anything, from the DVD. Any ideas anyone? Smelly laptop, smelly Vista.

Thanks dude - Just cleaned the filters out (which weren't all that dusty as the boss keeps them pretty clean) but I'm grateful for any advice that stops me being the biohazard I seem to be!

I started working here in June, my first time working in a school. About half the time since September however I've been sick, having had two chest infections and regular bouts of man-flu. This is annoying as it keeps me from martial arts, from concentrating, lays me up at weekends so that I'm JUST ABOUT well enough to go back in on Mondays and get sick again. I was feeling a teensy bit better last Thursday until, whilst at BETT, some BUTTHOLE coughed in my face (I nearly punched the guy) and I was ill all weekend again. Still, I got some Silent Hill played so not a total loss. BLLELEeeeeeehhh though.

Don't throw babies.

http://cn1.kaboodle.com/hi/img/2/0/0/c2/0/AAAAAtbF0jgAAAAAAMIDqQ.jpg

My first week here I got an old classroom whiteboard and marked out a grid in permanent marker. It sits in the stockroom and shows cartridges (names and numbers,) the minimum stock we should keep, a tally of the amount we have, and the names and dates of people who use them. Every month or so, the list of used cartridges and users is drawn up and sent to finance on a template spreadsheet and once the order comes in, the cartridges are re-stocked and rotated, the names wiped off again and the tallies re-marked. Low tech but it works alright.

MIDI shouldn't be causing the lag there, MIDI is a really small amount of information USB can easily cope with. Lag will be from the soundcard - try adjusting the latency time, though not so much as to get pops and crackles when using it.

Late one night our caretaker was checking through one building and passed the main reception. At that moment one of the phones began to ring. He went into the office, picked up the receiver but no answer, only the dial tone. The switchboard showed the call had come from room 66, so he went up to the room but found it locked, empty and dark. 66 is nearly the number of the beast so I'm sold. Haunted phones.

Hi again - it's working now (sort of.) We have a reasonably sized school here - an admin domain and a curriculum domain with one-way trust from the admin side. About 50 admin users and a few hundred curriculum users. Anyways, with the address I can set in its console I can map drives to it again now. Thanks for all the help there everyone. It's a Buffalo NAS also. I think the firmware could indeed do with reflashing, but I'm leaving it for a little - that can go on my 'to do' list. Hehehe... And what happens in an I-can-ping-it-but-not-see-it thread?

Cheers for the reply! Oh man, first 'real' job to do and I feel like I'm fudging it... Shouldn't it 'just work' though when turned on? DHCP should notice it and assign everything correctly, right? I'll get a laptop to it though and try that out. Thanks. EDIT: Oh well, discovered we have a useful utility for finding these NASes on the network. It had given itself a 192.168 address, which I can change from the management console on this machine, but cannot make it 'take' the DHCP reservation. Changed the reservation to a new address on the server but didn't want to take that one either. Little git. I'm back to the management consoles at least so I think whatever's ailing it can be gotten to now. Cheers Domino.