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When I run that the following appears: http://img350.imageshack.us/img350/5991/screenshotav3.jpg

I THINK both printers were added manually at each machine . I believe the ones in the ICT Suite were imaged with the printers added and I went around each classroom machine adding them when I first started here (from what I remember). This is not a good answer is it? haha.

Yes, they are network printers. I should have made that more clear, sorry. When I said 'local printer queue", I meant the queue being local, not the printer. Do you mean so the students cannot see the printer at all? How do you do this? I assumed that a printer was installed on a per machine basis as opposed to a per user basis. The only thing I can think of is to remove student permissions on the printer, but this is what is causing the problems stated in my first post.

I'm sure I remember seeing something about this in another thread, but I cannot find it anywhere, so decided to make my own. I'll start by giving out current scenario: We have two laser printers, one colour and one B&W. Colour is obviously very expensive and the kids have an uncanny habit of printing out 10 pages of the same full A4 colour picture which didn't need to be printed in the first place. We were asked to stop kids being able to print to colour laser, meaning only staff could. Simple enough job - remove students permissions on the printer. This leaves one issue though... when the students print something to the colour printer, it fails, but the local machine keeps the document stored to that printer with the status 'failed'. After that, all documents printed to the colour printer from that machine fail - even after the student has logged off and a staff member has logged on. The print queue doesn't ever clear after reboot. Obviously clearing the print queue manually on that machine will solve the issue, but past experience has told me that getting people to do that successfully is not going to happen. Someone mentioned previously on here about a staff member who admitted she "switched off" when she heard him start to talk about computers, leading to problems later that day. My N/M doesn't like any third party software installed on the server unless absolutely necessary. I guess this is for money saving purposes as well as fear of installing potentially dodgy software on the server. He has recently re-added the students user group to the printer because of the above problem, but today after several unless pages came out of the colour printer I was asked to remove it again. In this case, is there any way to get windows client machines to clear the print queue automatically when domain user logs off? If not, I will design an annotated PDF document to send around to all staff by e-mail explaining how to do it, but ideally I would obviously rather I could do something myself to prevent them having to. Cheers!

I think you have to be fair here. People do things in an interview (especially practical) that they wouldn't normally do due to nerves. Plus they know someone is watching them and try to get the job done as fast as possible so no-one is waiting for them, therefore don't think straight. You EVIL person! Haha, do you think they'd be impressed (by, as you said, using your initative) or annoyed . I think there would be quite a few people who would actually be impressed with that, but they'd probably clarify the issue afterwards, haha.

There is probably another thread somewhere similar to this, but not found it yet. Anyone got any crazy or funny stories from either personal experience or experience of a friend working in IT Support? I think we have all had the not plugged in or not switched on types. But my uncle was telling me about a call he got a few years back. It went something like this: Caller: "Hi, my computer isn't working" Uncle: "Okay, what exactly is wrong with it?" Caller: "It won't turn on" *My uncle then proceeds to go through the usual questions in trying to figure out exactly what was wrong. As you all work in IT, there is no point in detailing them* Half way through the conversation and after about five minutes, my uncle heard his technical colleague talking on another phone saying "you'll just have to wait for the power to come back on then". This made my uncle wonder if 2+2 really did equal 4. He asked the user on the other end of the line: Uncle: "Are the lights working in your office at the moment?" Caller: "No, why?" Uncle: "Has there been a powercut by any chance?" Caller: "Yes, there has." Uncle: :crybaby:

I dunno, it does sometimes work, take myself for instance @simongrahamuk I do agree with you. But as has been said before in this thead, some of the business tactics that microsoft (and other companies) practice are unreasonable. Plus when people support windows 100% and bash linux and open source down into the earth, yet have never used linux and rarely if ever used open source, that gets on my nerves too. I saw some sort of MP3 player at the shops today (didn't check which one) and noticed it had "DRM with this product means that it must be used with windows XP". Wow. I certainly won't be buying one of those then for me or anybody else. Even though I use windows to a large extent, I don't like the idea of being forced to use it and I don't want to force that onto anyone else either. Also, last time I checked (about a year ago admittedly), PCWorld were selling microsoft office for £470. I know it can be purchase cheaper then this elsewhere, but still, people are actually willing pay that much when you can get a similar and 90% campatible product for free. Do they know about Open Office? Most likely not. Why? Because microsoft get their hand into all the schools and businesses by offering them really cheap copies of their software, therefore there is little chance of the majority of the general public ever hearing about Open Office. Why do PCWorld/Microsoft even charge this much when they are competing against free software? The only thing that allows them to do this is by keeping their competition quiet. Incidently, Open Office is my all time favourite open source application because it is sooo easy to use for the people who have used nothing but MS Office in the past. I can't say the same about Linux to Windows.

Haaha, I started a thread in a rant section of another forum I go on about 'windows'. Unfortunately the forum owner is a Microsoft employee (and he knows I attend this forum so can't say too much in case he sees this) so it didn't go down too well. It is not a computer related forum, but there are a number of technical people that go on there. It seems I am the only fan on there of software that is free and open source... other people would rather pay for something they can get for free . The thread goes on for several pages, but in the end I got bad karma, so gave up.

Did you ever manage to get more info on this Geoff? Cheers

Lol, I can see what you are saying, if it was down to me i'd just ban it regardless, saves me an hour or two trying to find out what is being accessed on that site, haha. I can't really do it though, not unless I find evidence that more then just this one pupil is accessing dodgy stuff. My IT coordinator asked me directly not to ban it, so if possible i'll try and avoid it. I can see what you are saying though.

Wish our LEA was as kind Geoff, haha. Ours are control freaks. Ever heard the saying "if you give up control, you gain control?". I might quietly set something like that up webman if I get the chance. I have a linux server at home anyway so shouldn't be too difficult. @mrforgetful I agree, but sometimes the teachers encourage the kids to mess around for half an hour (especially before school) and youtube is a site they regulate often. If it gets excessive, I will just block it, but as for now i'll leave it be.

Using the [terrible] BGfL SINA, i'm going through all our internet logs in response to something a teacher told me today about a certain pupil. We are a primary school so it's unlikely we have anything terrible, but i've noticed rather a lot of youtube pages being banned. This is the site said teacher wanted to talk to me about with regards to this pupil. She said she didn't want to ruin youtube for the majority of pupils because it is a good resource, but this boy is accessing dodgy stuff and could I check what he has been accessing. Anyway, the blocked pages are all ones where the user has to verify their age, such as: http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=/watch%253Fv%253DoyBcCUI02tw http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=/watch%253Fsearch%253D%2526mode%253Drelated%2526v%253DZU8X2TaMWqc http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=/watch%253Fv%253Dx_uNCa3Y_E4 But obviously can't even access them myself due to filter. Tried to be naughty and find a proxy but had no success because our LEA is so darn good. How do other people overcome this issue? Its fine when a site is -obviously- bad, you don't need to check it. But youtube asks you to verify your age if a video has been flagged as bad by other users, which of course has margin for error. Not asking you to give me proxies here, so don't worry, haha. Chances are they wouldn't work anyway (none of the ones I have seen on this site before have). Blocking youtube totally would put me on bad terms with teachers and pupils, but ideally I need to see what exactly is on there that pupils have found that they shouldn't.

Incidently, I wouldn't have installed it yet if it had been my choice, the LEA forced it upon me by turning up unexpectedly at the front door armed with a CD... they will most likely ban us from using their MAN if I refused to let them.

Hahahaha! It doesn't work... well, Sophos works, but it takes anything that the machine used to be able to do with it. It takes about 10 mins to log on to those machines on average and even once it has the machine runs like a dog. 80% of the machines are either celeron 300MHZ, 600MHz and 900MHz each with either 128MB RAM or 256MB RAM. Our new ICT Suite arrives around Christmas time (best Christmas present I have ever had), so I can hope to get rid of the celeron 300MHz and 600MHz by encouraging the parents to have them. Ill do this by blagging them off with windows 2000 along with office suite (open office), desktop publisher (scribus) and maybe some other open source free software that sounds like it is expensive when described.

This is very good news... i've had a very large number of complaints in one of my schools about computers running slowly... to be fair it is taking about 10 mins to log on since sophos has been installed, which is ridiculous. The Celeron 300MHz/128MB RAM machines just about die a slow death when asked to do anything at the same time as running sophos.

Tis very odd indeed... Left computer on again over night as a test, could unlock this time, but all I could see was the background, no icons or anything else. In the end I forced it to log off and logged back on again.

Yeah... i'm thinking ideally it'd have to be a single page as opposed to a different page for each video, but can't figure out how i'd do this without PHP etc. I'll have a go with google for a bit. Thanks!

Thats a good idea actually.... is there any way of doing this easily without server side scripts though with regards to links? It's too early in the morning for me to be thinking of this, haha.

Also, how are you all giving this out to the teachers? I assume most of you are putting it on a network share, but do you then just give them a link directly to a network share? I have created a basic webpage which ATM gives links to each different category within the BBC Creative Archive, but i'm not very happy with it, it doesn't seem very professional. I'm toying with the idea of creating a hyperlink to each video and picture, but that will take forever.

Just out of curiousity... how many of these machines have IE7 installed? Not saying it is this, but IE7 already has some annoying problems that I discovered today. Maybe this is another one.

Cheers Geoff and Ric. All appear to be working fine now except for WW2 which I have tried twice now and fails to unzip. 7ZIP doesn't seem to throw up an error, just won't extract files either.

Nope, no VNC software installed. Tried CTRL + ALT + DEL, didn't do anything . Ah well, I just forced it off now. I was just wondering if it was a common problem in case I come across it again at some point. I should follow my own advice sometimes... "have you tried turning it off and on again" .

This is really strange... I locked my XP machine before leaving work last night. I left it on so it could complete some downloads. I come in this morning and the 'user name' and 'password' fields are completely blank and greyed out, I can't type anything into them. The computer has not crashed, I can press enter and cause it to display an incorrect username/password combination error and I can move the box around. This is not at all important, just more of a pain then anything because I can't get in to see exactly what I was doing when I left. Just wondering if any of you have seen this before, google didn't really throw up any useful info. Cheers

I apologise, I agree with you completely.

Lol. Incidently he also has google ads on his website. Yet in their T&C it says certain websites are not allowed including: I think that his website both promotes illegal activity and infringes on the legal rights of the colleges etc. to sensor material. I wonder if google know the "backend" part of his website exists, especially for the purpose he designed it for?