What is the best computer suite layout?

We only have one computer suite, and it has been in two different layouts from the time I was involved in it. The first one had all the computers around the walls of the room and people faced the walls when they worked. The teacher could see everyone's screens from the front of the room and everyone had to turn around to face the teacher and thus leave their keyboard alone when it was time to receive instruction.

Then the computer suite got moved from its small upstairs room to a larger downstairs room, and then for some reason, the tables were all lined in up in rows facing the front, just like a lecture theatre. The teacher at the front could see everyone's faces, but he/she couldn't see their computer screens. Or the teacher could sit at the back of the classroom and see all the screens, but they couldn't instruct effectively.

Then the computer suite moved back upstairs, only this time into the larger room right next to the small room that it used to be in, and so there was a fresh opportunity to change the layout. But we decided, and I was involved in this, to keep the front-facing-rows layout.

Now, we're looking at what other schools have done, and what the Polytech, where I'm doing MCSA papers, has done, and thinking about putting rows that are at right angles, so the teacher can easily see right down the rows what everyone has on their screens, and everyone has to turn to face the front of the classroom when the teacher is instructing. It turns out that by doing this, we might also make our use of space in the room more efficient and be able to use some of that space for something else. We might even be able to use a projector without taking over someone's desk, and use an existing wall as a screen.

Over the years at different sites including the Polytech I have seen all kinds of different layouts, but from what I can see the right angled rows layout is the most common/popular and probably the most practical for this type of situation where there are effective "dividers", in this case created by computer screens. The traditional layout works best in classrooms where the teacher can see all the desks regardless of how they are arranged. This principle has important application in all classroom design.

Non bootable Vista DVDs / MAKs, KMSs etc etc

After a lot of poring through the MS website I discovered indeed, the upgrade DVD you are supplied with by default will be non bootable. But you can get a bootable one on application to MS.

The more tricky thing is to work out what licensing key to use with the volume license. Vista requires that every PC is activated, including those on a volume license. To make life simpler for network administrators the Key Management Server was invented. Every PC on your network installed off the volume license files will automatically try to find a KMS first. The catch is that you have to have at least 25 PCs on your network looking for this KMS before it will accept activation requests.

So if you are like us and only have a few PCs that are running Vista at this stage then you have to get a MAK (Multiple Activation Key) onto each one of those PCs. Perhaps rashly I went ahead and installed Vista on a couple of PCs as soon as we got the DVD, assuming we would be able to get the keys within 30 days. That time is almost up, and the MS website that we registered with still isn't working properly. The MOE helpdesk (Datacom Services, also the LAR for Microsoft NZ Schools Agreement) has got us a KMS key so far, but all that does is activate our KMS server. It's totally useless in our situation.

Another plug for Windows Live Writer

Well, I had a go with WLW, and I had a go with ScribeFire, and I had lots of goes with Blogger's own composer.

And after all that, even though WLW can't do as much as Blogger, it can't justify and it can't post pictures, it is still the greatest because in other ways it works so much better.

You see, I'm about to change the shape of two of my existing blogs, and that means altering or deleting many articles. WLW will be able to help me achieve this task much faster than anything else because the offline client is so much easier and quicker to use than something that runs in a browser.

What was the other thing? As I went to push the Publish button to send this article to Blogger, I remembered it. I have several Google accounts, because I use different ones for home and work - I use one Gmail account for work related activities. This causes no end of problems at home when I can end up being logged into the wrong Google account, come to post a message and find I have to log out of one account and log in to the other. WLW doesn't require me to be logged in with the right Google account because it does that automatically.

REVIEW: Epson Perfection V100 Photo Scanner

It's not often I get to review something, but here's a look at a value for money option for scanning those photos, negatives and slides. Previously, if you wanted to scan slides, you were looking at something around $500 or more to get a reasonable result. At $299, the V100 is a lower cost way of getting this done, and it delivers good results too.

The package consists of the scanner, power adapter, quick start guide, software CD, USB cable and film holder. This is not just a photo scanner: it can also do general documents and OCR. Still, it is the film scanning capabilities that interest me enough to do this review. Installation was easy on a Windows XP Professional system. Install the software before connecting the USB cable, then connect up and away you go. Like most scanners, this one has buttons on the front to invoke software applications to do what you want.

When scanning film, you have to make sure it's inserted into the holder the right way up. Removing the platen cover inside the lid reveals the lamp which provides the light source for film scanning. Then place the film holder onto the document glass directly, making use of the icons moulded into the scanner base and film holder to get it the right way around. Insert the film or slides. Film goes in shiny side (face) down with the top edge facing left. The film holder takes strips of up to 6 negatives and can scan all of them in one pass. The film is easy to insert although the holder feels flimsy. Slides must be inserted and removed with the holder sitting on the glass as they are not supported underneath. You can scan up to four slides at a time. The whole process was simpler than I remember with HP scanners, which could only do two or three slides and maybe half a film strip and were fiddlier to set up with a separate lamp unit.

The V100 scan wizard features three modes: Full Auto, Home and Professional. Full Auto is the simplest but it only scans at 300 dpi. Provided the film is inserted correctly it automatically detects it and sets the options automatically. If you want a higher resolution, choose Home. It allows you more control over the settings, and should be quite satisfactory for most users. At 3200 dpi, negatives or slides can take three minutes each to scan. This reminds me of my old parallel port scanner, which could only get part of the scan done before it would have to empty its buffer, and then continue. But that was at 1200 dpi; the Epson is transmitting perhaps three times as much data. Still, it has to pause the scan every minute or two to flush data. Professional mode gives full control over all the settings. It can give you 48 bit colour, for example, but most users won't need it, and I wouldn't see myself using it most of the time. At 3200 dpi, a JPEG file will occupy about 2 MB at the default compression level. Bitmaps and TIFF files can also be created as well as PDFs. You can easily change the settings for each group of images, as you are asked to confirm them before each scan begins.

In my collection, due to the cost of processing, I used to have lots of films lying around that had been shot but not processed. You guessed it, I'm a digital man these days. Last year I finally got around to having those 25-odd rolls of unprocessed film developed, but not printed. (Most of them, some going back nearly 20 years, turned out alright except for a roll of Ilford XP1) The cost of printing and an ordinary scanner would be more than the cost of this unit, so this option is the better one by far.

For this review I did only basic scans at 1200 dpi. I haven't evaluated the options for more complex scans, corrections or fixes. However, my impression of the scanner's performance on these simple tasks is very favourable compared with an HP scanner that I used several years ago to scan most of my slide collection for the internet. Colours were rendered well; on the whole, colour correction from negatives seems to produce a satisfactory result. The price point and scan output of this unit should satisfy home users who have a large collection of slides or negatives that they want to scan to share on the internet. Recommended.

Are Vista upgrade DVDs not bootable?

Like all NZ schools that have joined the MS license agreement, we received a Vista Business Upgrade DVD recently. There's just one little problem: it's not bootable.

Here's a practical illustration of the situation. In the picture above, you see the extraction from IsoBuster showing what is on a bootable DVD ISO image obtained from Christchurch Polytechnic's Elms program. Notice we have selected the "Bootable CD" item on the left to display the BootCatalog.cat and Microsoft Corporation.img files on the right.

In the picture below, we see the same view of the NZ Ministry of Education DVD. It has the ISO and UDF data items, but it lacks the "Bootable CD" item and its files. And, you guessed it, the other DVD boots for installation and this one doesn't.

I have never actually heard before now of any Windows NT operating system that is not placed on a bootable CD or DVD. Even if it is an upgrade version, it's always been possible to start with a clean HDD with nothing on it, boot from the CD/DVD and install.

Modern MicroATX low profile PC

To bring the series about PC designs right up to the present day, here is a modern low profile desktop PC. This is a generic chassis, the Foxconn DH153, which like many chassis has been adapted to "Prescott" specification when Intel decided that a vent directly above the huge CPU cooler was needed. (From comparison with the other photos one can get an idea easily of how massive the heatsink and fan assembly are on these series of Celeron CPUs)

This board (Intel D101GGC) has two PCI slots, PCI Express x1 and x16. The chipset is ATI Radeon Xpress 200, which provides Radeon X300 onboard graphics. This is a better choice than Intel's own video chips because it can run Windows Vista Aero out of the box.

The DH153 is a low profile chassis and this illustrates the cleverness of the low profile backplane which enables the same motherboard to be used in either a full height or low profile case. All that has to be changed is the PCI cards (in some cases just the bracket on each card). There is no need for a separate motherboard design to fit into a low profile chassis as NLX required. Although there will probably never be a generic chassis as clever as the Compaqs seen earlier there are some good elements in this case. The drives are mounted in a removable sub-assembly; just disconnect all the cables and lift it out to add or remove devices. On the other hand, the power supply can't be taken out of this chassis without removing the motherboard, and the lid is almost certainly not strong enough to support

Ident Server on Vista Clients

Some proxy servers (generally non-Windows) require an Ident server running in each PC on the network so that the server can get the name of the user who is requesting Internet access. While there are limitations and security issues with the Ident protocol it is a simple easy to configure option for some applications.

With the advent of Windows Vista we found the old Identd service that we used to use on XP clients cannot install itself any more. I could find nothing suitable from Google, so I wrote a Windows application to perform this function.

I will look at how it could be made available if there is a demand for it. It doesn't install as a service, so it just has to be loaded at startup, and runs in the system tray.