Broke School Needs Coding Help!

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Hi People

I am hoping somebody can assist me here.

A primary school I work with has just bought 5 laptops for use within the school and has required that the OS be downgraded to XP. (Too much old software to be able to afford to use Win 7 right now)

We got everything working except for one problem the wireless. The only driver we could find, (Acer the manufacturer doesn't support win XP for this model so we had to use 3rd party drivers) won't automatically switch the wifi on, somebody has to manually press Fn+F3 to get it to activate.

This is not a good situation when trying to log 4 to 8 year olds onto the domain with no working wifi!

So I need something to record me pressing Fn+F3, I assume that this will not return a standard scan code, so we know what is being sent to the system when these keys are pressed, and possibly released too, record it somewhere accessible. Then I need a small program to actually send this code as a simulated keypress, key up and key down may be necessary to the system at startup then wait a few seconds for the wifi to come up and connect.

Please somebody help! I'm 15+ years rusty as a coder, heck I can't even read my own code I wrote 20 years ago properly! God I'm getting old!

Cheers

Tim

Thanks for the ideas so far, I think I need to clarify.

In order for users to log onto the domain, the wireless needs to be up, therefore this has to happen before logon hence to me it needs to execute as a startup script.

I've got to re-iterate my gratitude for the ideas and I'm going to keep looking into them more would be much appreciated.

Thanks again

Tim

Posted 19-Apr-12 11:06am

Tim Magraw

Updated 20-Apr-12 9:00am

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Steve Maier · Answer 1 · 2012-04-19T11:13:00

Solution 1

Take a look at this scripting tool. It should do the trick for you. We use it at work for complicated things...

http://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/[^]

Posted 19-Apr-12 11:13am

Steve Maier

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Answer 2 · 2012-04-19T12:17:00

Solution 3

I have no idea why using Windows system on old computers at all. Learning Windows programming? Then I can understand. For all other users you can always find some light-weight Linux distro. Instead of paying Microsoft tax, people can have nearly everything, including .NET (actually, alternative SLR implementation in the form of Mono), office, graphical editors, multimedia — you name it. One good choice is LUbuntu which can run on nearly anything.

—SA

Posted 19-Apr-12 12:17pm

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov

Comments

VJ Reddy 19-Apr-12 20:09pm

Good suggestion. 5!

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 19-Apr-12 20:25pm

Thank you, VJ.
--SA

Nelek 20-Apr-12 16:00pm

You confused this time :P

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 20-Apr-12 19:21pm

Sorry... second time today. This is because I collected few days of non-replied notifications, did too fast.
Thank you for pointing it out. (So, my thank you in all cases... :-)
--SA

Steve Maier 20-Apr-12 9:58am

Many schools have "site" licenses for things like the Office products and XP given to them by either Microsoft or the Gates Foundation. And hiring someone that is an expert in Linux and other things as well as paying for an IT person for all of the MS stuff is abit beyond many schools budgets.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 20-Apr-12 15:19pm

I disagree. If IT person is needed to serve, say, Ubuntu, even more effort is needed to support Windows. Mind you, I am not a Linux fun, I just can compare.

And taking Bill's gift (god save him) carries hidden long-term expenses: falling into a long-tern dependency on commercial products. Certain things should be free, not for saving money (you are right about the cost of the IT person, but this cost is not added, it is no more then the same), but for keeping safe infrastructure. If something bad happens to some company, its product is undertaken; and this is not the case with open-source.

Database storage systems, revision control systems and OS should be open source or based on open standards.
--SA

Steve Maier 20-Apr-12 15:36pm

But here we are talking about systems for a school. Running a counting program or an alphabet program for the kindergarden classes up to running the sharing software that connects the kids to their online storage systems where they can save their papers and other things. Some of those are old pieces of software that might not be even maintained or the company in business. Are people that promote free software going to step up to the plate and re-write it for them, test it, and then give it away?

But just as you said, just because a system has no cost to purchase it (XP or Linux), it does not mean that there is no cost to using and maintaining it in the long run.

I have been talking to the IT manager at a school recently and he is all for buying more and more software for the systems that they have. They are actually buying iPads for many of the classes and alot of software for each as well. But this comes down to the same issue. He is then locked into iOS apps. He can't use free flash games for the kids. That was a decision that the school system made after he did alot of research. But for him, they knew it was a cost up front and also was not trying to re-use old software like the original post was.

Smaller schools that want to use the same or equivilant software to save on costs can't just chuck the whole thing for a "free" solution that probably does not have most of the apps that they need. You are right, there will be free databases and source control systems out there, but most 1st and 2nd graders are not being taught the finer points of database design or need to have their source code in a repository. ;-)

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 20-Apr-12 15:56pm

Well, for school this controversy even more critical. You see, the balance of all your arguments in terms of money will make open source beneficial even for school. In short, the open-source society already invested more of resources then Bill and Microsoft did. Well, maybe Microsoft invested more, but more in terms of research, not so much in terms of free ready-to-use systems. You were right only few years ago, but now Linux needs less expertize in installation, support and administration then Windows systems. Time has changed, but did you really noticed that?

Locking in with iOS is easy. Not so with some Linux distro. In fact, going from Linux back to Windows or Mac OS X / iOS is easier. For example, OpenOffice documents can be exported as Word, or OpenOffice can be used on Windows, etc. Peoples are not locked in with open-source products, because open-source developers have no to little interest in that.

As to kids vs. professionals, the situation is opposite to what many thing. For a professional, it's hard to change the OS, because a professional participates in a supply chain and plays in something called techno-sphere. For a kid, a transition is the easiest, for "illiterate" adults is a bit harder, and for professionals this is the most problematic.

--SA

Steve Maier 20-Apr-12 16:26pm

Since this has become a religious discussion, I am going to stop. I gave the OP a link to a free app to help him. Discussions like this can go on forever. Sometime, off-list I can give you a list of apps that schools use today and I would love to see the free alternatives.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 20-Apr-12 19:19pm

To me this is not religious at all, poorly practical, but I agree to draw a line. But as to a list, I would be interested to see the list, yes. Even if you won't see the alternative, the move to open source is not useless. The problem is not so simple and is self-referencing -- no open-source systems => no demand for open-source applications => no applications. Each system needs a bootstrap. I would like to hope open source punch the hole in this situation.

Thank you for this interesting discussion.
--SA

Nelek · Answer 3 · 2012-04-19T11:38:00

In the group I was when playing online games were some people very happy with keyboards that could make macros simulating series or combos of pressed keys like "nostromo". If I don't remember wrong that could be automated as well. But I think that would be too expensive and way complicated to be used by kids.

Others went to software solutions to make the same, using normal kayboards. There are many of them, like macro recorder[^], jitbit[^], autohotkey[^], winautomation[^] and so on.

Hope you find something it helps you

Broke School Needs Coding Help!

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