TwoZeroAlpha

Just be careful, I'm fairly sure there are some rules about reselling windows. Especially if you've got a VLK. You could sell them with No O/S installed, or chuck a linux flavour on it. On a related note we're now selling off some old RM pcs with monitor etc. Chucking XUBUNTU on them (new HDD for data protection laws). All ok-ed with SLT, finance and County so looks to be a go-er. Plan is to sell them dirt cheap to families who would not normally be able to afford a PC.

On the other hand I had a student come to me this morning, he's 10 and was reinstalling XP on his home machine (as he's going to dual boot it) but ran up against needing some sound card drivers. So he downloaded the right ones and got it working. Then remembered I'd mentioned a sound card driver problem last week so came to me today with them on a USB stick incase I needed them. Thanked him and told him to come back at lunch and I'll do my best to explain how drivers work and are generally specific to device. But he is one of the exceptions. Last year had one of the supposedly "clever" ones spouting off infront of the whole class about how much faster the ICT suite would be if the PCs had wireless cards in them. Yup on a fully wired 100Mbit network, teacher hadn't arrived to I took the opportunity to educate them a little on the stupidity of his comment. Oh, and the number of students who have no idea of the difference between the PC base unit and the monitor.

Got windows on two walls here, SW and NW facing. Around 2pm the entire office is filled with light, and when there isn't direct sunlight I've got nice views of the countryside.

At work on the LEA 10M/bit (so I'm told) connection. Microwave to another school, which goes to a tower and then finally to a hard link. Not too bad really. http://www.speedtest.net/result/424012632.png

I believe the onus is on the provider (AP owner) to secure the device. Your card could be configured to connect to an OpenAP where available, and does so without asking you, so not really your fault. In a reasonable case, if you caught someone outside your house with a laptop and found a rogue MAC on your network you could ask them to stop, but then again why isn't it encrypted. If you found someone cracking WEP keys to gain access that would be an offense (although i can't remember what exactly)

I'm fairly sure they're Genuine, we've got a few LfT laptops here, but they were acquired before my time. Might be tempted to use them again, but at the moment latops that fail go into my spares bin and then get scavenged, I'd rather spend a little extra on new laptops and set them up myself than get some new ones for cheaper and lose my spare parts kit.

Find an old box to tinker with / chuck linux on Install and config a new system for the staff to use (all room booking was done on paper here until I got bored one day) Go to miniclip.com and play some games Watch stuff on youtube Endless lists. (and what tech_guy said!!)

I've done similar before as a test at home, and pointed my borther's machine to a FGW type device (actually a WINXP box sitting in the garage). The XP box then pointed traffic at the proper router. Was just for messing around really, no real milage and a little while ago, but I'll see if I can make something similar work when I'm back at school next week. Can the reconfiguration of IP be scripted and invoked by a teacher? As I recall you can change IPconfig with a batch file, can't remember the specfics, but I used one to switch the school over from static to dynamic IPs last year. There's plenty on google. Guess you'd need to grant the teacher(s) admin rights over the FGW.

Ok, off the top of my head (and seeing how all this is still theoretical) Client PC gets it's gateway from DHCP server. Let's say you config a box on the network with an IP 10.xxx.yyy.5 (let's call this FGW for False GateWay) which has two network cards bridged together and is told to "allow sharing of internet connectivity". Don't know really, guess WIN XP could do this happily enough. So FGW is configured to point at the RBC gateway normally, but in the event of an outage you can reconfig the NIC on the outgoing side to point at your 3G routing box and that's the switchover done. Just set the DHCP server to point clients to the FGW machine instead of the RBC gateway. Admittedly I've never done anything like this myself, but can't see any reason for it not to work. HTH. TZA

Or if you're unixing it up anyway, squid+dg combo will do filtering quite nicely. Still even on a 3g mobile broadband, the bandwidth is going to take a hammering. You'd have to be careful about usage caps etc. I seem to remember 1.5GB/mo being a normal sort of cap, and if you loe internet for a day a school full of teachers will soon nuke that. In theory I guess the easiest way would be pointing all internal traffic at a false gateway, that switches between your RBC and hidden links easily.

Damn, there's some sad cases out there. Makes me feel quite good about myself. Although a fair proportion of the moans on there are self induced.

Just got a full workup for two rooms sorted through Proactive Learning Proactiveworld UK - Welcome Getting installed after half term.

Not that I'm recommending you follow what I do, but I like sudafed non-drowsy. Caffine just doesn't work for me but a couple of those little babies and I'm fine. "pseudoephedrine" is the active ingredient to look for and it mimics the action of adrenaline. Note : No drugs should be taken without first consulting with a qualified person, speak to your doctor or your pharmacist. I am not suggesting you try this course of action, just saying it works for me.

Those benches are designed to be stood on, jumped on, walked on etc. Was the bench physically sound? They don't just tip over, maybe someone else tipped it? Personally, accidents happen, don't sue it just pushes up premiums and leads to fun stuff getting banned. Hope he fixes soon though.

We run all the essential stuff on Windows (DC / AD SIMS DHCP DNS etc) I've got two linux (ubuntu 7.10 and 8.10) servers working for me doing various jobs. The 8.10 is currently looking after the class room booking system, the 7.10 serves student generated webpages to the intranet. The student webpage idea was setup to encourage a few interested pagebuilders / html coders. The student comes and asks for a login so I create one and create a symbolic link to the wwwroot of the apache server. They FTP in and it's easy. Probably a way to do this through LDAP but I haven't figured it out or looked. Also our SEN dept runs dual booting XP and edubuntu machines and I've got about 10machines in an ICT suite which do the same.

I run NetPanzer on a bunch of dual booting boxes (WinXp/Edubuntu local login) Good fun isometric tank battle game, no resources just attack and conquer, if you lose all your units.. you get 9 new ones to start again. The kids love it. It's available through Apt and there's a Windows version too. Usually get one of the workstations hosting and the rest to join. I've avoided putting it on Windows so then they can only access it with my permission.

Ah but.... the google page has less content, so loads quicker (less time on - saving energy etc). And seeing as FF fills in previous addresses I can be at google with a simple "G > return". Even quicker as it's my homepage.