Memories of an old RM

nwtv2003
Posts: 700
Joined: Tue 20 Jan, 2004 22.20
Location: Granadaland

DJGM wrote:
nwtv2003 wrote: . . . though they were designed for an older system and
have slow processors, all of them have Windows XP . . .
Sheesh! They must be like the technical equivalent of running through treacle!
They are at times, I don't know what the exact specs are but I know that they wern't all designed for XP, some say 'Designed for 2000/ME', some even say 'Designed for Windows 95.' They don't use the whole RM thing anymore, they only use RM Filter and thats for the Internet, they all run on XP. Though they all used to have Windows 98.

Though 2 rooms at our school/ college use brand spanking new computers, made by HP with XP! And they are very fast. But I must stress that all computers are networked.
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iSon
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Joined: Fri 15 Aug, 2003 23.24
Location: London

nwtv2003 wrote:
Bail wrote:Image
Our school still uses the bottom one, though they were designed for an older system and have slow processors, all of them have Windows XP. They also have the CD Drive taken out.
Went to the University of East London's open day today, and was shocked to see them running RM machines which are painfully running Windows XP! They went down in my estimation tremendously...until I saw one of the Mac Labs with plenty of iMac's and G5's - my respect for them rose slightly based on that room.

Was very shocked about the RM machines running XP. Looks like the bottom C-series picture too. How old are the systems? Shocking!! :shock:
Good Lord!
Cheese Head
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Joined: Fri 15 Aug, 2003 13.39
Location: Rockhampton, Australia

We have both machines, with XP and 98 working side by side. The browser crashes often.

At my old school, wehad an NT network. Last year, I downloaded the latest version of messenger that worked without giving me a permission message. Then, dowloaded some music, stuck it all in the public folder, everyone could get at it. When we worked in the cmputer room for any subject, i put say the peice of maths done in that shitty logo program and shoved it in the public folder so it looked like we were doing work...
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I don't know my future after this weekend, and I don't want to
Big Brother
Posts: 184
Joined: Fri 15 Aug, 2003 13.21

DJGM wrote:
nwtv2003 wrote: . . . though they were designed for an older system and
have slow processors, all of them have Windows XP . . .
Sheesh! They must be like the technical equivalent of running through treacle!
Hardly, My old Pentium 200Mhz PC is running Xp an it works fine. Yeah a little slower when loading say a game or something but it's still going strong. It runs my webserver and things. It's a good piece of kit still, I just keep things uptodate and keep the PC in good running order. Not a problem.

Besides RM PC's run most of their software from the servers do they not. I dunno. I just always heard the technical guy saying the server couldn't cope with all these people trying to open Word or Publisher etc.
squawkBOX
Posts: 17
Joined: Fri 15 Aug, 2003 15.55
Location: Scotland, UK

The school I am at is quite lucky when it comes to ICT. We were always lagging behind in everything due to the building that we were in. When the school moved, we started getting new computers to replace the existing macs that we had. Now we have about 100 network points in each room. (despite there not being enough room to hold that many machines!) When we started off we had Win98 on all the machines, running with Winsuite 2000. Now all the computers that we have are XP machines running Winsuite.

We have a computer in every classroom as we do a period by period register using Phoenix software, so thats about 100 rooms with computers in it, we also have them in Business Studies, Computing, Design & Technology and in various science rooms. That that amounts to about 190 PCs in those classrooms plus all the others computers in the office and in management. So its a pretty hefty setup. All these PCs are dells ranging from 700Mhz 256Mb (which will be replaced next month) to 2.5Ghz / 512Mb machines that were installed at the start of the year. To run this we have three very large Dell servers, one for called Admin for staff email, phoenix and staff storage. A Pupil server for all the pupils files (this needs replaced as its forever failing due to overusage) and a application server which is used to run network programs. They are all Xeon based servers on an NT network.

In our common room we have all the macs, all the old machines were taken away a few weeks ago, so we are now left with only iMacs which is alright for internet usage.
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Pete
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Joined: Fri 15 Aug, 2003 13.36
Location: Dundee

Our RM stuff isn't bad as the two main people in charge of the computers cannot stand the things. They say the only thing it's good for is allowing them to change large chunks of the network easily.

Pretty much everything is on the server (although different parts of the school use different servers to reduce strain on the network). The internet is all filtered with RM much to the disgust of all pupils and stuff (esp the IT teacher who believes that chatrooms should be allowed in "a controlled environment" to teach the kids safety - the council are lawsuitphobic though so they blocked them all). Topic Selector just sticks everything on autonmatically now and as you move up the school / take certain subjects you get more things.

I myself use Mozilla Firefox instead of IE (5.0 - they gave up trying to upgrade it in the end) whichout any protest from him and I have quite a lot of other programs (inc MSN which is blocked everywhere else).
"He has to be larger than bacon"
Chris
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Joined: Fri 15 Aug, 2003 19.03
Location: Surrey

Hymagumba wrote:I myself use Mozilla Firefox instead of IE (5.0 - they gave up trying to upgrade it in the end) whichout any protest from him and I have quite a lot of other programs (inc MSN which is blocked everywhere else).
So you get to run MSN Messenger and use a browser of your choice at school? :shock:

From what I hear, running an alternative browser can bypass the filtering imposed by RM allowing you to access games, porn, downloads and all sorts of things they want to stop you from looking at!
Big Brother
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Joined: Fri 15 Aug, 2003 13.21

Oh I remembered the hassle my old school had trying to go from IE 4 to 5. What a nightmare! They did it slowly on every machine. Then machines started crashing and not coming back on all over the place. When I left last year it still hadn't resolved itself but the new servers were being brought in so all the machines could have XP installed. And apparantly everythings changed there... so my sister tells me.
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Pete
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Joined: Fri 15 Aug, 2003 13.36
Location: Dundee

Chris wrote:So you get to run MSN Messenger and use a browser of your choice at school? :shock:

From what I hear, running an alternative browser can bypass the filtering imposed by RM allowing you to access games, porn, downloads and all sorts of things they want to stop you from looking at!
Nope, filtering is done at the ISP end (RM's evil Internet For Leaning ISP) not at ours.

I don't think he knows we have MSN running yet, he's looked at my browser several times and hasn't passed comment. I know for a fact his son uses it so I preume he can recognise it.
"He has to be larger than bacon"
Chris J
Posts: 26
Joined: Fri 15 Aug, 2003 18.36
Location: Great Britain

We've recently had a new filter put in place at our school too. It's blocked a whole load of websites, including almost every games website you can think of. It does seem to categorise a fair few sites as sex, so I think I'll try out a domain with *sex* in the doman, see if that's what's causing the problem.
nwtv2003
Posts: 700
Joined: Tue 20 Jan, 2004 22.20
Location: Granadaland

Chris J wrote:We've recently had a new filter put in place at our school too. It's blocked a whole load of websites, including almost every games website you can think of. It does seem to categorise a fair few sites as sex, so I think I'll try out a domain with *sex* in the doman, see if that's what's causing the problem.
I bet our college which it was like that, the main reason why we have the computers is because of 'Educational Research', this is only because the other ones got seriously damaged due to viruses and vandalism. Though you wouldn't believe how popular Miniclip.com is at our college, pratically every one goes on it at least once!

We still use an RM Filter, so it blocks out sex sites and all, but someone (who has now dropped IT) managed to watch some hardcore porn during an IT lesson once, using Windows Media Player, because of the Media button at the top.
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