NZ Tekonverse

  • HP Thin Client pt 2 / Windows 7 / Office 2010 / Office Live

    This post is a bit of a wrap up of a whole lot of stuff. Firstly our experiments with the HP Thin Client are continuing. I successfully got it to connect to a WS2008 RD server with NLA turned off. I’m now experimenting with student logins and mandatory profiles. One of our standard configurations for…

  • New vs secondhand vs rebuilt / refurbished PCs for schools

    OK, this is a big subject of discussion for schools. Should your school buy new or second hand PCs, or look at rebuilding existing computers it already has? In NZ there is no direct funding for computer hardware. Schools have to make the most of their tight budgets and the cost of computer purchases adds…

  • HP Thin Clients vs NComputing

    As I noted in my previous post about NComputing thin client terminals, HP and other vendors have been producing the thin client technology for much longer. In NZ, NComputing has been particularly effective at getting its name out there in the education community in a way that we haven’t seen with HP, in part because…

  • Switching to Windows 7, part 2, & building new computer

    Well, I have carried on with this task since I installed 7 onto my home PC a couple of days ago. So far it has been reasonably straightforward. The following are points of contention/issue that have been encountered: Even if you are the administrator of the computer, you aren’t automatically granted full permissions onto other…

  • Switching to Windows 7

    Right now I am setting up Windows 7 on my home computer. This was not something I had planned to do but was driven by the fact that XP was working very poorly and would have to be repaired or reinstalled. This computer is pretty old now, it is an Intel 915 motherboard with only…

  • Thin Client Computing and the NComputing L230 Client

    Thin Client is an area that deserves much more press when it comes to the education market. They are of limited use in high-capacity situations like video editing or multimedia production, but just great for ordinary every day word processing or spreadsheets. They work by connecting to a terminal server and running their user session…

  • Reusing an old Computer Monitor for DVD Playback

    This year is computer upgrade year at home, and one of the first steps I undertook was to replace the 17” Philips CRT screen I have owned in the past few years (107S51) with an Acer 17” LCD (V173). Best screen I ever owned. The old Philips sat in the corner and gathered dust, until…

  • The open vs proprietary hardware debate

    When I was still at school, most of the early personal computer platforms were proprietary. Apple. Commodore and Tandy were among the big names in development at that time, each with its own hardware platforms developed in house. That soon changed with the development of the PC platform by IBM which became open when it…

  • Visual C# Express 2010

    It seems like a long time since I studied to be a programmer. In fact it was back in 1999 that I completed my Dip BC in the programming stream at CPIT. A stint of Access development over some holidays convinced me I was not cut out for that line, and when I returned to…

  • Moving right along…

    It was just a year ago that I blogged about our progress in the direction of migrating to Exchange Server 2007. One year on, we have just finished uninstalling that server after migrating everyone for a second time, to Live@Edu. What changed our great plan to run our own in-house Exchange server? Exchange 2007 is…