Crispin

The way we do it is we get a local IT retailer to come and refill our cupboards. A toner mini-bar style setup. We keep all our toner and cartridges in two big cupboards in our office and have a certain required stock level based on past usage. We keep spreadsheets with all the printers and their locations and when staff come to collect one we make a record of whats taken. The company then comes and audits what we have and restocks us accordingly. Absolutely zero hassle and haven't had any mistakes made as of yet. If you get a nice company they will help you out with other hardware/software supplies too if you're lucky. Maybe worth looking into.

Dunno if anyone else knows, but that guy is Chris Morris. He's the genius behind bluejam, jam, Brasseye, The Day Today and Nathan Barley (Co-written with Charlie Brooker). If you've never seen the above shows you're missing out on life. Oh and that IT Crowd Parody is awesome, hehe.

one recently in my local paper: "Freak pants fire kills pensioner" Enough said really.

is it just me who has never found this show funny? There are of course parts which make me laugh but i'm not a huge fan. The canned laughter is awfull as well, they should have made it more like 'The Smoking Room' or dare i say it, the office. Just my opinion

Yeh I think that happened well before I joined the school. Nothing came from it, I think I need to push management for any kinda help in that sense. We shall see

Hi all, (not sure if this is the right section to post so feel free to move if needed) We are currently trying to get FITS compliant by summer next year. We've already implemented a helpdesk which is running well and are creating so much paperwork and forms, the guys at FITS are bound to love us I was wondering if there are any schools out there that would be kind enough to let me and my boss nose around your ICT dept and see how a FITS compliant school gets by. My manager has been trying to organise a visit to a FITS school but none were available in our area. We are based in south east England. I thought this would be the perfect forum to make a request! Send me a PM if you think this is something you can help with. If you have any advice for us about FITS feel free to comment. Thanks!

My advice to you is to not look into it any further and preferably burn any CSE related material in the school. Perhaps thats a bit strong but I certainly don't recommend it. We are currently in the process of removing CSE from our school, as it grinds our PCs to a halt in most cases. You'll find newer PCs will deal with it better but if you're still running 512mb/single core boxes then you will struggle. It does offer a centralised method of software deployment, and allows you to lockdown most of windows as the kids can access all apps, server shares etc through the explorer. But to be honest its better in my opinion to get strong policies set up that allow kids access the usual way, and just remove access to the run command, control panel etc... Unfortunately our McAfee we use is on all our machines, and scans all incoming and outgoing traffic. This means software deployment and booting up with CSE is painfully slow. Our old viglen laptops take anywhere from 15-30 minutes to load up with CSE compared to around 10 minutes or less with a clean install. I wouldn't be able to give you any specifics on bandwidth and the proxy aspect but we allocate 1 partition to CSE on one of our 2000 servers, we keep packages in a seperate area. It doesn't seem to be the network thats affected but more the PCs hardware. Also once you are fully reliant on CSE, including its printer management, package deployment, network toolkit (for application linking and network drives etc) then it will be very hard to get yourself out again should you wish to get rid of it. Like us.

Ive run into problems syspreping machines at the 3rd or 4th time aswell. I remember reading a microsoft article somewhere stating that when using volume licencing while syspreping, this will allow you to sysprep and re-sysprep without any limit. With a single licence i think there is a limit. Im sure there is a MSNet article somewhere documenting the limits of sysprep.

All laptop repairs are billed to our department. We buy all the power supplies aswell. Some do have warranty though. Our head has a very teacher focused attitude and wouldn't charge them or their dept for damage. If someone drops a laptop and totals it, we simply have to buy a new one, oh and don't get me started on the price of the laptops themselves! I wish I had the power to change the system thats in place but I think financially speaking, the burden will always be on us.

I was wondering if you guys could give me some feedback on how you handle laptops and their power supplies. At my school, every teacher is issued with a laptop and we usually get a new batch in every summer. The teachers seem to have no accountability for what happens to the equipment. Most of my time is taken up repairing laptops or calling Ergo (our supplier) for repair work because a screen has smashed or a dc sockets been damaged. Power supplies are even worse, I now have two power units which I have to hide to make sure I can use them for testing/imaging, and we have no spares. We have faulty supplies come back we have to bin, always on a weekly basis. Is this normal? Im starting to think perhaps the equipment itself isn't robust enough but maybe im grabbing at straws. How do you guys handle these issues?

cheers for the quick reply! I will take a further look at this tomorrow.

Hi all, Firstly just wanna say hi as Im newly registered here. Been working at my first school for about 5 months now and this site has already given me some great resources to sift through! Im having an issue with VPC 07 (yes I know its rubbish). We have VPC installing by GPO aswell as another Policy for its security settings and have had the program running in our main ICT suite for some time. The previous technician was a programmer and scripter and had somehow managed to create a permanent VHD on the client PC, which would 'reset' itself after the student had logged off. It would then be ready to use by other students with no permanent changes made by the student. Unfortunately, we have deployed new images on some of the ICT rooms and have lost whatever changes he made to the program to achieve this. We of course still have the old images and I plan to root around in the image in the morning to try and find out what he has done but I was wondering if any of you guys had come accross a similar situation? Or are using a similar technique? Im a total newbie at VPC as I use Vmware myself, but haven't been able to find anything similar to what Im trying to achieve on the interweb. Perhaps Im not looking hard enough. Part of the work they're doing requires they are able to demonstrate certain skills involving the control panel, display settings etc... and this is the method we currently use. If you need any more information please let me know, Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!