Katy

Yes - lease costs more over the lease term and you have to give the kit away, which is bad if it's in good nick but who has honestly seen photocopiers in a decent state after 5 years of hammering... we preferred to lease as we could then say to finance "if you don't sign a new lease there will be no printing" rather than "Well we can try and bandage up this broken heap I guess". Although finance won on the last contract as it was I think £4k cheaper to buy them than it was to lease for 5 years and give back.

The Sharp stuff is through Midshire (who are now Sharp Business Systems, think they are currently rebranding but not sure as there's still the Midshire name on paperwork etc) who would be nationwide, the Toshiba and Xerox are Sensible Choice who are based up in the north west so won't have any presence or engineers etc down your way (assuming your location on EG is correct i.e. Kent)

For our copier supplies and servicing, we pay roughly the same price for the leased one as we do for the ones we bought - roughly 2p/page colour and 0.02p/page mono (plus VAT). This covers the toner and all servicing and warranty etc (although they were supplied new so that might need taking into account if you are using refurb kit). These are Sharp 60ppm (leased) and Toshiba 75ppm (purchased), these are in the region of £5k a machine though new. With the smaller printers (Xerox VersaLink C405n size) it's a bit more per page, think it's double the cost, but we don't pay anything for the printers (we don't own them, we don't lease them, they are just... there.)

It came from Estates in the first place... guess that could work, they'd just need to wire up 2 or 3 bells as the rooms are fairly spread out. Loads cheaper too.

There's some form of clunky video intercom system that has handsets in 2 rooms that has never been used, no idea how that is cabled as it came with the building. Otherwise everything they've done is battery powered but it's not to hard a route to cable for PoE.

No idea which category this should go in so.. it's hardware, sort of? The nursery want a door bell where, when pressed, it alerts them on their multiple iPads. Ring apparently has this kinda thing but it uses random ports and I never managed to get it to work through the filtering and firewall, plus it's probably not GDPR compliant with all the video being sent via their servers somewhere. Alternatively a door bell that can sound in multiple classrooms although a couple of them are too far away for normal wireless door bells to work. Anybody got any good ideas?

I didn't know that specific user here used to work in your school!

That looks like my allocation, what about everybody else?

Well Romeo only has 3 feet so... 1 and a half pairs?

Er.. I might have to say no, I don't fancy being bitten and clawed. I'm still proud I managed to get 2 pairs of socks by complaining about @DJ-1701 winning the laptop case competition last year

I can create work addresses for them.... got plenty of free Office 365 A1 licences to spend 2 on my cats.... You should have said "only if you get a photo of them wearing the socks", Romeo I'd maybe manage but to get Suzy into socks would be suicide.

@kennysarmy I'm having good reports from the rooms I put the 5.18.16 driver on, 0 crashes so far today so rolling it out everywhere tonight (and tickets for all the other rooms are coming in fast)

I went for blue before looking at the picture to realise it's the same blue I already have a few pairs of. My cats would like a pair each though.... navy and red....

If you're lucky and you delete it then recreate it with the same UPN before you let AADConnect sync run, it'll reconnect up okay - I've had this once where I deleted a user by accident. Might be worth trying that with a test user first though.

I've got some rooms with ancient boards on this "new" unsupported driver (5.18.16), a room with a "new" board (578Pro) on the 5.18.16 driver, and a room with a "new" board with the HID mode firmware but the latest driver (5.18.19) so hopefully will work out which of these no longer crashes tomorrow and be able to report back.

I've installed the "BSOD proof" driver on a couple of PCs with the old v2 boards, tested one by drawing on the board for 20 minutes (more mind numbing than you'd imagine) and it didn't crash. I've set my boss the challenge to make it crash in his lesson in there tomorrow. Going to try the firmware on one of the newer boards (either 378 or 578 Pro, forget which) before I go home, set him the same challenge.

Yes, not sure what happens if Windows decides it prefers the previous driver but in my case it replaced the network card's Microsoft driver with the Intel one I was trying to install.

Not yet as they are all ancient and out of warranty, I've found this: https://community.prometheanworld.com/forums/topic/update-to-1st-generation-2nd-generation-ab100-ab300-ab500-bsod-windows-10-1903/ which seems to be a "this driver doesn't BSOD" and for the newer boards https://support.prometheanworld.com/article/1779 which is some different firmware to try which puts the boards into HID mode, but changes some functionality.

If it's random PCs and random users (rather than the same PC each time) grab a copy of the c:\windows\memory.dmp and analyse it in WinDbg to see if it's a specific driver at fault - I've got the same problem with the Promethean driver causing Win 10 2004 build to BSOD repeatedly Instructions in my blog post I wrote up the other day https://katystech.blog/2020/09/analysing-bsod-memory-dumps/

I used LTSB 1511 but since 1607 I moved onto Enterprise (and then later Education). I've never had a PC just decide to do a feature update on its own (using MEMCM and WSUS to manage updates), we do the big updates during holidays where we can turn them on and let them sit out the long wait with no teachers about.

We just use an Azure storage account, set the access tier to Archive and it costs about £1.35 to have 1TB there for a month (Archive tier means it's got to be there at least 180 days, if you delete it or alter it before the 180 days is up you still have to pay for the 180 days)

We had something installed when our new build junior school was put up in 2014, will have to see what it's called on Monday if I remember (although it's not wireless, and don't think they use it as the handsets were placed in the wrong places). There's no good reason why Ring doesn't just use port 443 and tunnel everything back to the servers, you can't even use the client app within school due to the random and large list of ports it needs.

We're currently watching: Benidorm Shameless - kinda worrying how similar my boyfriend is to Frank Gallagher... and I'm watching The Fall, on Netflix, which is a really good police drama about a serial killer.

Saying that, with the default settings we can't do things like look at files Administrators have permissions to without going through UAC prompts, I just put up with it (and generally access from another server via UNC path as that bypasses it)

You can install drivers from a command prompt, pnputil -i -a driver.inf I've used that to install Intel drivers over the top of the default Microsoft ones for a network card before which I guess is technically updating the driver.