Month: August 2008

When I got my work PC with Windows Vista on it, I installed it alongside my existing XP PC and kept both running. In fact I still use the XP PC occasionally, but obviously as time went on I switched as many things as possible to Vista. At the time I had one major MS…

I have now received these and had a play with them. The main changes in the S5 that I noticed immediately over the S1 are the larger LCD screen, of course the hot shoe on top, and small incremental differences. In features and functionality it is very much like the S1 I have grown to…

Today I installed Ghost Console on my PC for the first time in years, and it brought back a lot of memories. We bought a suite of new PCs back three years ago, and got Ghost licenses with them all, which entitled me to receive the Ghost Solution Suite 1.0 CDs and manuals. At that…

Many schools in NZ are taking advantage of the Ministry of Education’s TELA laptop leasing program which pays about two thirds of the costs of the lease and also provides mobility insurance and pickup or onsite service. Our school has been using these laptops for several years since the program was extended to include primary…

Overnight from Friday and during Saturday I multicasted two groups of PCs in our computer suite. This can be quite a tedious process getting all 8 or 11 (in this case) clients up and running and then the multicast itself can take up to several hours depending on how fast the slowest client is going.…

After three years of using my trusty Powershot S1 IS, I will be upgrading very shortly to a Powershot S5 and accessory Canon Speedlite 430EXII flash. The S1 was almost end of line when I purchased it, and the S5 is also end of line and has been discounted in some parts of the world…

When I first started working with a network, we just set up each staff PC with locally installed printers, even though all the printers were TCP/IP devices. Pupils PCs got their printers mapped as shared network printers using login scripts. We just figured it was easier to set staff up that way in case there…

As this blog has detailed, I have gone through a process of various automation systems for imaging PCs using Windows XP.  When I started working at the school, We had few XP workstations at that time, as most of our PCs were too old to do XP and Windows 98 using Ghost was the thing.…

The HP Compaq 6710b and 8510p laptops supplied under the NZ Ministry of Education TELA and Leadspace programmes have a very strange hardware configuration of an onboard Broadcom Gigabit Network Card that is configured as a removable device, and will appear as such in the “Safely Remove Hardware” list of removable devices that is accessed…