eean

I use the Wireless Setup Wizard on the control panel. This copies a exe and a ini file onto a pen drive. You can run it from a folder on the hard drive but you have to use the subst command to create a drive letter to that folder (to trick it). I made the following script. This is a .bat file that creates a temporary drive letter. Then it calls an AutoIt script file that automates all the OKs etc... Use on the end of our automated cd setup. It has never skipped a beat. Bat file here: @ECHO OFF ECHO Setup in progress. Please do not touch. REM This script runs the windows xp wireless setup wizard. REM This 'maps' the t: drive to c:\windows\setuptemp\03_setupwireless SUBST T: %SystemRoot%\SetupTemp\03_SetupWireless ECHO Installing Wireless Network REM Start the Windows Wireless setup wizard. START /W %systemroot%\SetupTemp\Autoit3.exe %systemroot%\SetupTemp\03_SetupWireless\Setup.au3 Auto it file here: ;This script automates the instillation windows wireless setup wizard Splashtexton("Setup", "Setting up wireless connection. Please do not touch.", 500, 100) ;Prevent user sending any keystrokes BlockInput(1) Run ("t:\setupSNK.exe") WinWait ("Wireless Network Setup Wizard", "Do you want to add") Send ("{ENTER}") WinWaitClose ("Wireless Network Setup Wizard", "Do you want to add") WinWait ("Wireless Network Setup Wizard") Send ("{ENTER}") ;Allow Keystrokes to be sent by user BlockInput(0) You need to put the bat file and autoit3.exe in c:\windows\setuptemp. You need to put the autoit script and setupsnk.exe and all the other wireless setup files in c:\windows\setuptemp\03_setupwireless EDIT: Unlikely to work on vista!

I don't know if it will help your searching but the CL51 is not made by RM, but by Compal. They do have a spares centre/repair agent in the UK, so they might be able to help( http://www.compal.co.uk/ - search on edugeek for the phone number), but when I last called them they weren't really used to dealing with the public. TBH, I'd say you'd be lucky. The reason why you don't know much about upgrading laptops is because there isn't much to know! You can only really upgrade the memory and HD and usually the battery is knackered before you do either. The CD drives are generally non-standard (although we have the CL50 and they look the same.) Why do you need DVD? With your larger hard drives could you get away with making an image and running it of the hd? EDIT: I've just looked on the compal site and there is a spreadsheet called 'spare parts for sale'. There are some dvds on there (@£25 each!) but if you email them to see if they are compatable, you might find you're lucky.

Most of our ICT suite is P600 but upgraded to 256-320mb of RAM. The only thing they can't do is -run the IWB (well they can, you just can't use the rubber). -run photostory (they can but when you do the preview the voice is out of sync with the picture) -photo editing (again they can, but it's a little slow with 3 megapixel pics so folks just reduce the size of the picture). Logon time ~30 seconds (with roaming profiles) and they can do 640x480 short movie editing with no problem. Half of the pcs are 1.2ghz ish and nobody has ever noticed which half of the room is slower. They run windows xp, office 2000 and McAfee antivirus + the all normal primary school cr**p. We've only just got rid of our p450s, and that was because we upgraded them rather than because people were complaing about their speed. Not ideal, I know. And I am looking to replace them. But if you are really tight for cash see if you can pick up a load of old RAM and consider reconfiguring Sophos. A 10 minute logon would sound to me like another issue (DNS perhaps, heavy profiles - do a search on here for plenty of ideas, there is also a patch you can get for xpsp2 that takes 20 secs of the logon). I re-install them at least once a year, keeps them fresh. (I have an automated system, so it's easier).

Here it is. Only works for XP. Hope it works.system_shutdown_v1.1.msi

Lots of adverts on mine (on the top and google ones down the side) (perhaps they are blocked by your LEA?) also a bit american. Not that child friendly either. Type in London and you get: Not actually any general information about london on the front page! I haven't seen Encarta myself, but some other people in our area said it was a bit hard for primary, although there is 'Encarta Kids'. For KS1 I would definately recommend heinemann young explorer. It is differentiated and reads to the children. You can subscribe for a few hundred quid per year or just buy it for about £350 from REM. Perhaps try http://simple.wikipedia.org There seems to be a gap in the market somewhere.

You basically get a site licence if you own one smartboard - so long as you don't use it on a competetor's product! I deploy it by group policy and it's fine. Used Wise Installtailor (free) to choose setup options and made a MST using the instructions on the edugeek wiki to disable autoupdate. I've also heard bad things about smart installs, I've never had too much trouble. I just wish they would make it easier to upgrade, without having to reinstall the entire product.

Our Telewest has been getting a bit rubbish too recently and the on demand TV is very slow and rarely works now that Virgin have taken over. Not sure why, all they've changed it the colour scheme!

Pale Purple do Plone hosting from £120 per year we use them and so far so good. Plone is really good - after setup everything can be done through the front end and it is easy to set up permissions on different sections of the site. It's just a shame its so beefy there are only 2 places in the UK that will host it and the other one costs £700 per year!

Well... It doesn't matter now! I put my spare hard drive in an it went 'Click... Click... Click'. Hmm... not a good start - RAID or no RAID. This drive was sent to me last year, 4 days after I needed it as part of the RM Next Day Onsite service agreement. Well that was a couple of hundred quid well spent!

I have it ON - causes no problems for me. Just have it so I can access the hard drives. Remember why Microsoft turned it on by default? Melissa. You can configure it or switch it off using standard GPOs.

Got an opportunity to redo our hard drives so I thought I might go for RAID. Only software, I'm afraid, but apparently that's still better than no-RAID. So, do you have RAID 0 (mirror),1 (striped) or 5 (striped with parity)? Having done some research on the webnet, some places say you'd be a complete fool to use RAID 1 for anything other than swap files etc... But, with a good backup strategy it should be fine?? We're talking about staff and pupil data here and running some software, plus software distribution. Other places say the CPU load, and delay in writing (especially small files) is really high with RAID 5. Is none of this offset by the fact you are sharing the write between 3 drives? Or will I not even notice the difference and not bother with RAID at all? Do other factors (such as network interface) become the weaker link? 1 Server doing all jobs (print, wsus, file, domain etc..) 700mb, 1.5ghz. 50 computers. Primary school. Some software run from the server. Currently 100mbs network card but might upgrade this to gigabit if I get round to it. (Have gigabit port on the switch). Thanks!

You can add a printer using Run32dll: See this page for command: http://www.robvanderwoude.com/index.html Scroll down to /Ss command where you can export the settings for the printer to a file. When you add the printer you can import them. NB: This is an inferior method to ChrisH and I haven't actually done it myself! PS. I find on our OKI c5100n that the toner save was fine for BW text but ANYTHING else (even the slightest bit of grey on a title on a web page) rendered the text unreadable. I figured that people would end up printing it twice, so I don't bother with toner save. Go to the OKI site, and you should be able to download mono only drivers. This is useful if you want to only allow mono printing, or make it mono by default and add a separate colour printer. They also have some excellent print monitoring software - downloads logs from the printer and calculates cost (per page/user etc) by how much toner they actually use!

No, not yet! As I'm in primary, I don't have my own dedicated workstation for system admin, nor do I have a little cupboard to sit in. (I do have a classroom, however). Keepin' it real. 8)

Well, even for admin it could be handy, especially as I've only got Windows 2000 server and some of the active directory tools only run on XP. Of course, the simpler solution is to install logmein on one of the work stations - I tried that once and it worked, but after I reinstalled the computer, I could never get it to go. Also, now that 'EcoClub' are forever going round switching computers off, you can never find a damn one that's been left on!

Well, you can access any network resource - as you are on the network, rather than just remotely controling one computer. I am, at the moment, networking the staff laptops. They use offline files to access their work at home. However, because very few staff ever bring their laptop into work, nothing will ever get synchronised. If I had a VPN, they could do this transparently. The HT also would like to be able to put things on the network and for staff to be able to access them from home. Of course, VPNs have their downside: primarily security. Also they are complex to set up (with all the firewalls etc...). Therefore, as a primary, I doubt I'll ever get round to doing it! Logmein is great for me to access the server from home, but, even if you did have the Pro version, it is a bit hit and miss if you want to try transfer files from network drives whilst dialed into a workstation.

Just tried new product from LogMeIn called Hamachi. Sounds like a 8) idea: Create a VPN through all the firewalls and proxies in the world by relaying via a public IP address (provided by LogMeIn). Their software sorts everything out and it is quite easy to set up. However, when I hovered over my status it said "Relaying (Slow)" and it wasn't lying! I managed to browse the remote server but not actually open any files. Also, it gives the remote server a odd private IP address, so my PC didn't know that it was called "\\Server", so even if it was fast enough, I wouldn't have been able to use exisiting drive mappings or sync files. There is an IP file in Windows, IIRC, that lets you add specific DNS settings. I might trial the Pro version to see if it gets any quicker. What sort of speed to you folks with real VPNs get? Anyway, nice idea. Shame it doesn't quite work.

Sorry to be rude and bump this up a bit. Surely someone must have some expereince of tablet pcs? (Don't make me go down to Dixons and ask a spotty 15 year old! - A man has his pride!)

We have a child (8 year old) with Cerebral Palsy and may be getting some money from a charity for a laptop and bits(£1-£3k, hopefully). I was thinking a tablet PC may be suitable. (She can use the stylus on her nintendo quite well!). Her aim isn't terribly good but it may just be good enough. I was thinking of one of those with the twisty screen so it could be used as a normal laptop too. (She has a joystick and she uses Clicker). So, anyone had any experience with these. I heard that some aren't very robust: 1. What would you recommend? - Needs to have a long battery life and be robust. 2. Do you have to use the stylus, or can you just use your finger? 3. Is the stylus 'special' or can any object do? (We might be able to use a more grippable object). 4. Are the screens hard? I'm thinking if she has a stylus in her hand when she goes into spasum could she push through and break the screen? Any advice welcome! Thanks.

The original reason was that water managed to get itself in the wire. It then seeped its way along the wicking, to the socket where it short circuted the POE and melting the socket and killing the poe adaptor and ap. The instillation company were very, very sorry, and replaced it all. Thought it may reduce the fire risk if they were off at night. But there are other benefits too!

We had problems with freezing for the first few years. Usually, after about 20 minutes of problem free use, a couple of the computers would just freeze (usually as they wanted to save). If the computer was just left, it was fine after about 1 minute. Some programs, however, didn't like this and it crashed them. Not sure if it was new firmware or new drivers (we have dlink g650 cards, and the UK drivers stink - use the ones from tsd.dlink.com.tw), but I doesn't do it any more! We never had app data redirected but could it be that yours are still freezing but, because you don't redirect app data, you don't notice it so much? Also, I always have them on a timer plug (it's all POE, so its easy). This way they get a good hard reset every day. I think that helps most technological appliances!

Is it centally managed? Our d-links are supposed to be able to force a client to go to a different access point if one AP hits a certain number, but it's very crude and they sort it out amoungst themselves. As you'd expect, it just crashes the whole thing! So it remains switched off. I suppose, it might just work if you had 2 or 3 APs all in exactly the same place e.g on the trolley but on 3 channels, working as one cluster. (But I doubt it!)

Are all the pcs a member of the domain? If they are, and you are a domain admin then you shouldn't have any problem. Try removing it from the domain and adding it again. If not, you'll need a password for a user on that PC. You'll probably enter it in the form: pc01\administrator (if administrator is the username). Then the password.

Trouble with any more than 5?? That sounds a bit rubbish! There's probably something wrong there. We have 15-20 on one AP without any trouble - occasionally, if they all hit the logon button at exactly the same time, group policy won't apply correctly to ONE of them, but that's fixed by logging off and back on. You may have to go with a more commercial-grade wireless network - like blue socket or some of the cisco stuff. Some folks on here have experience of this. Basically, you have a controller, server end, then 'dumb' access points. The controller can then load balance the clients across several access points. At the moment, all the clients will attach onto the loudest ap even if it has 30 users on it and there may be a slightly weaker signal a few doors down with none on it. They can also automatically 'turn down' some APs and switch channels. (Our aps will pick their own channel - you have changed away from the defaults haven't you?) You also may want to look at the cards. I've found that some of the Intel internal cards get a bit funny with more than a few users and linksys ones don't like *certain* APs with WPA encryption. Our D-Links work fine (now we've spent 2 years getting the firmware and card driver combination sorted!)

Documentation here: http://www.robvanderwoude.com/jthelp/jthelp.htm Never used it myself.

I used MaSaI editor. I didn't repackage it, i just added the files it said in the guide, then added the ini file.