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I use Simple Machines Forum Its free. Has loads of support sites and a fantastic arcade mod made by me my site If I had money to burn and had to by one it probably would be Invision Power Board.

Well it was actually 22 years ago...It wasnt for a council house, it was for the only broken down dump we could afford - the council house was too dear!! - the choice was continue paying rent to the council or buy a dump then one day I'd at least own something. If it was 20k now...I'd just write a cheque And yes house prices are stupidly high but then again compared to 22 years ago wages are also stupidly high where everything else has become cheaper (now going up I'll admit) 22 years ago it took everything I could raise and a shit load of worry to buy a 2 bedroom dump of a house so why should it be any different today Its only the numbers that have changed...at the end of the week youll have nothing left same as I did, which in my opinion is only fair....why should I have had it tougher than those starting out today

Well there you have it...I'm upper-middle or upper class Which must be right as the credit crunch doesn't effect me I have no debt/mortgage/credit everything I own is paid for including my house. My opinion...the people today just starting out are no worse off than I was when I started out. Me, wife, baby lived with my parents in 1 room until we got a council house. I worked 6 days a week, wife worked 4 hours each night as a cleaner ( no child care vouchers in them days all we got was free cheese and butter from the EU mountains). Still needed 3x my wage + 1x wife’s wage + 10% deposit to get a £20000 mortgage to buy a basic 2 bed terrace. Every penny we had went on "living" extras like a new TV etc were bought with money made doing "homers" at night - used to be a mechanic so always a pound to made at night . Now 25 years on...everything’s paid. I just packed this job in to go back to being a mechanic @£21k a 7k increase. Wife’s worked herself in to a nice $23k council job. Kids are up and one has left home and we have money to burn...even after just spending £4500 cash on a new toy - Honda VFR VTEC Don’t you for one moment think it wasn’t hard getting this far, struggling to find £1 to buy a leccy card, living on turkey twizlers and beans, first holiday we had was when the baby (mentioned above) was 15. ....you people today don’t know what tough is!!! If you cant manage on one wage then quit your boohooing and get 2 jobs. Live on food from farmfoods/iceland, walk, no holidays, no mobile, in fact no phone at all, no sky tv, no nights out, use second hand shops for clothes/kids toys etc etc I’m afraid any one caught by the credit crunch gets no sympathy from me. You should have seen it coming, I did!!

Tastes great if you dilute it with vodka or peppermint aftershock

We have 60 ThinkCentre A60 (type 9374) also from misco @ £195 each. They have been up and running a year past easter. 2 x harddisks have failed, both western digital drives, and both replaced with seagate drives. First time I phoned Lenovo got asked the usual name etc said we are a school and had 60 of them, harddrive has failed, they asked are you sure, yes, can you restore it blah blah, tried all that from hd/cd/network it doesn’t work, hmm ok could you swap a drive from another just to make really sure, will it affect the guarantee of the other machine if I open them up?, no, ok I'll swap and phone you back. Called back - PC working with new HD, OK you happy to fit a new drive, yes, no problem we'll send one out the old drive must be given to the courier when they deliver the new one. Second time...harddrive is broken, ok we'll send one out. No hassle but I suppose its much cheaper for them sending a £30 HD rather than an engineer. And they talked english not indian/polish english....real english

We use this one...its the right price FLV Player - Tell you how to play flv files free

Drat thats where I went wrong....didnt use an anti-static rag!! :D

So far we have no wireless equipment, it’s been mentioned but has always been shot down in flames before it ever got to the point of frying little Johnny’s brains. Then again half the little Johnny’s here have so little brains a 10 seconds on defrost would be enough to finish them off. What they purpose for here, part of the pathfinder project, is a microwave link from HQ then we feed 5 other council buildings. When I spoke to the guy from THUS I asked how they planned to get it through planning once parents found out that’s its virtually a mobile phone mast on top of the school….his answer “hope no one notices and pays no attention or else there will be problems” Then he said….”is all a load of crap, it does you no harm, look at me, 40 years I’ve been doing this and I’m fine. When I worked for BT we used to climb into 4.8 meter dishes when they were powered up wearing radiation suits, it did me no harm” Whether it did or not I don’t know, but the guy is 60+ ,has hair and sprinted up the stairs quicker than I did  I would imagine there will be an uproar when this surfaces because that’s what folk do…its ok for little Johnny to have a mobile phone virtually in contact with his body 24hrs a day, sit in a wifi zone at night – maybe all day as well, get bombarded by SKY TV microwaves from a satellite, eat zapped food for his tea….but Oh no you cant put a mast there!! Back to the CB thing…we all had ‘em before the internet/mobile phone age anyway my mate had one with a “rubber duck” aerial – a rubber aerial about 15” long bolted to a car wheel in his bedroom, he acquired a 500w booster for it which worked fine for a few weeks until it melted!! No exaggeration, it got so hot it bent over and moulded itself to the shape of the wheel….he then got an outside aerial but kept the booster….this is the same guy who had a modified mobile phone (first one I saw – brick size) modded for more power as we lived in the wilderness…now 30 years on and he’s cancer free.

is this not simply low power to stop them all interfering with each other? I remember CD radio way back in the dark ages being limited to 4w and I’m sure that was just to stop everybody interfering with each other. We’ll find out soon….local council are planning a LAP centre here with microwave link and 2 segments similar to a mobile phone antenna….its not been to planning yet but does require full planning permission….they are expecting some trouble

Its been mentioned in another thread but I've setup a sorceforge page for it so thought I'd give it its own thread here. Erics Room Booking System. A php/mysql driven booking system made for booking computer suites in the school here but could easily by adapted to book anything not just rooms. Any number of rooms/assets. Any number slots per day. Booked by department/name/initials. Uses can be local or authenticated from active directory. SourceForge.net: ERBS

Took them a long time and many unhappy customers before they fathomed out what honesty was….I was one of the unhappy customers that signed up for their “unlimited” broadband which actually was unlimited for 6 weeks then the changed/capped everything and denied/lied/misinformed everybody ..then banned me form their forums. Moved to F2S which were excellent until Tiscali got their grubby hands on it. Now and ADSL24 customer, costs more than £6.49 a month though, but like they say you get what you pay for and £6.49 doesn’t by much even the ad - 2 woman in the bar "my mate really likes you" makes the guy out to be a complete plonker

srochford proxycfg - looks like its worth further investigation No access to the ISA server. We used to be able to sneak past it by setting the gateway to the next hop out but they must have got wise to that. Their contract is up in July and the local council take over but no info on what we will be allowed to do yet...frying pan to fire springs to mind Nexarius Everything’s ok with the managed/vol licence stuff, it’s only the schools unconnected stuff we have problems with...there are various unconnected PCs spread around the school examples... Kids won a PC running Vista in a comp...It worked for 6 months but now needs activating. Music uses Sibelius on standalone PCs...it wont activate. Local firm donated PC with oem XP home..wont activate. Can all be done by phone but a couple of clicks would be easier. Its not the end of the world but if vars could be added, like you can in Linux then it just may work.....next plan it connect them through a Linux box and see if it can handle the authentication to the ISA Something to fiddle with to look busy

Hiya people...question for you... First we have a managed service so cant add PCs to a domain etc, and have virtually no control over anything. What Im trying to do is sneek none domain PCs out to the internet to activate various software...now if i conect them to the network they get an IP, add the proxy IP to IE, enter username/pass when asked - can browse the I'net like normal but activating software/windows xp/vista just reports faulty internet connection. In linux you can add enviroment vars for proxies with a username/pass in them to allow the whole internet thingy to be transparent and this works well here. Can you do the same with windows? This software activation is getting to be a real pain in the a$$. They will not allow us to connect any none managed PC to the domain for any reason and we dont even have a real phone line where we could use a dial up modem.

Much like the situation here. No control of the domain stuff, dns, dhcp, gpo, cant add computers unless they are managed ones. It has its advantages though...if its broke its not my fault Have a look at http://softulz.net/products.shtml its handy tool Took a while to pick our 184 managed PCs out of the whole LEA domain and sort them in to groups but once you have them sorted its easy enough to do normal things like install software, copy files to a group of PCs.

which i appear to have broken.... Not really broken...It must have 1 room to work...delete all the rooms you get an error, you can still go to admin and set them up again though, I could have added checks but didnt see much point because if you didnt have any rooms to book you wouldnt need it

My fault...had it in a category that only registered users could see... Id rather not direct link to it because this way I can track the number of downloads...not that that means much other than someone thought it was worth a look

Ive tried a few booking systems but couldnt find something that worked or did what I wanted...so I made my own Demo http://www.el-tek.co.uk/bookings/index.php use 'admin' and 'password' or 'user' and 'user' Download http://www.ericsworld.eu/f2/index.php?action=tpmod;dl=0 Coded in php/ajax/mysql...for those who don't have php..its time you did Download, unzip to a folder on your webserver, edit dbsettings.php to use your mysql server, point your browser at http://www.thefolder.bla\setup.php. That should install all the datebase table, default settings, some departments, a default room and admin user ready to go... Any feedback good or bad is most welcome...

We use the System Shutdown msi posted In this Thread Easy enough to send it to any/all machines through group policy.

Maybe it’s just me but if I saw it advertised by an agency I'd ignore it. Any time I’ve had anything to do with agencies I get the impression either the agency is not interested or the employer can't be bothered too do their own recruiting which usually means you never hear another thing....even if the job really existed in the first place. And I could probably apply... but 700 miles to work is a bit far.

Just got 62 Lenovo small footprint desktops. Original description: AMD Sempron 3200, 512MB, 80GB 7200RPM S-ATA HDD, no diskette drive, PCI/PCIe Desktop (4x3), NVIDIA GeForce 6100, 16x DVD-ROM, Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet, Windows XP Professional. This product has a three year limited warranty and is entitled to mail-in or carry-in repair service. Bought mostly due to price. So far so good. No problems with them so far but its only been a month. If they live out the 3 year warranty then burst in to flames its not the end of the world @£190.

What it says on my payslip?? I have no idea other than the numbers are not high enough What the kids/staff call me is of little importance to me..staff and kids call me techie, technician, Eric, Mr, Sir and I sure a lot more behind my back. I call the kids monsters (jokingly) , if I know their name then I use it, Oi you, but I don’t call them Mr, Miss etc so don’t expect it back. Talking directly to teachers its first names, all of them even the head. Telling the kids to see a teacher is Mr X Mrs X or they wouldn’t know who I was talking about. I do think a lot of what’s been described in this thread is of "support staffs" own making. I see it here all the time, support staff are more terrified of the head than the kids are. It’s like the peasant and the king of yesteryear. I don’t think forcing kids into the Mr, Mrs way does much to dispel that either, its just a power trip!! At the end of the day were all equal, all just people, and I treat them all the same.

Never had much luck with NVU or Kompozer, they both seem to have a mind of their own. Been trying First Page 2006 http://www.evrsoft.com/download.shtml for a couple of weeks. Seems ok but has a nag screen when using the free option but might be worth a look.

Sounds like they are being redirected to the wrong place..??? or to faulty code or a dodgy app. Which app? is it home made? Doesnt sound like a "php" fault as its obviously working before you get that far.

I dont think they would jump on a school too hard or at least MS didnt. Here there was 60 PCs and 2k Advanced Server, all they had were 2k oem stickers on the PCs. I phoned MS and asked them what the best plan of action was, things like if we buy a 2003 licence will it cover the 2k server until we can upgrade. The guy didnt seem much intrested, gave me a number to phone for a local reseller but Ive never heard a thing since. Six months on and the licences are on order. Id say if your worried tell the head your concerns and confess If you admit there is a problem and are seen to be taking action to correct it shoud keep them off your back.

I did I also remove any unlicenced stuff without asking. Too bad, youll get it back when I get a licence is my answer. They sulk but they get over it. When I started here the contract said "responsible for software”. I soon put that right in writing! Refused to have any responsibility for software/licences until a full inventory had been done (still waiting) and the only stuff I’ll install must have a site licence. It did kinda put the cat amongst the pigeons but we now have a new head who doesn’t fancy jail time and knows one end of a PC from the other so things are now moving in the right (legal) direction.