As a fledgling social enterprise providing technical support to third sector peers, we are looking for a product that can assist in managing the ICT assets of our clients. We wish to offer a service where we can offer automatic, recurring systems audit which will measure against an agreed benchmark (minimum hardware spec, software license entitlement, etc) and highlight where pc's do not comply with the benchmark in a printable asset inventory. Do you know of such a product that is aimed at the service provider that will not break the bank?

We run two networks, one for admin and one for public use. An extra router has been added to prevent the public accessing the admin network.

An ADSL router connects to a small business server with a single network card that runs DHCP in 192.168.16.# Range.

A switch connected to the router has the admin computers and printers connected to it. This switch also connects to a wireless router that takes it IP address from the Server (192.168.16.200) it then has its own LAN and runs DHCP in the 192.168.1.# range. The wireless router has a file and print server plugged into it with an inkjet printer connected to it.

The public use wireless laptops that print to the inkjet printer.

The admin people would like to be able to print to the inkjet printer on the public LAN. Is this possible?

I have produced a quick drawing of the network and uploaded here: http://www.hmca.org.uk/network/network.pdf

We have a small network - wired not wireless, though we'd like to use wireless too - linking the net, half a dozen PCs, our server and a couple of printers. The existing router, which is connected to a standard domestic broadband/telephone line, is dying, or at least it's not very well. We'd like to replace it.

Can you give any guidance as to the easiest type/brand to set up and what specifications we should look for. We seem to be able to get basic kit for about £30, but could spend a lot more, is this justified? Many thanks

We received an enquiry today from someone living in South Warwickshire who has a BT Broadband/ADSL connection that rarely exceeds 250kbps. As an alternative they have tried data services from mobile phone providers, but only GPRS is available at 110kbps. Are there any other solutions to obtaining a faster connection to the internet at an affordable price?

I have a HP Laser Jet P2015d connected to my PC and my PC is connected to a network. How can other users on the network access this printer?

when typing in Word, or express, every time I type a punctuation mark such as @, etc the cursor jumps up a line and inserts the typing there. It is very confusing and can get quite messy for touchtypists. It makes typing an e-mail address quite difficult as you have to cut and paste back into the correct position. this is a fairy new problem, it never happened before and I haven't installed a newer version of word. Thanks.

Printing gobblygook We have a networked HP Laser Jet P2015d that connects to the network via a HP Jet Direct 175x server. We have our own print server. Some times it prints fine. Other times it prints gobblygook. Any ideas?

I'm looking for an external hard drive for the organisation I work for. We have set up a wireless network with about 6-7 desktops and laptops, all Macs, and currently we all save to one computer on this network. I've been doing a bit of research into external hard drives to store and back up our work and I've come across some things called network hard drives. As I understand it, these can be used for data storage across a network that all users can access and save to, without slowing down the main computer on a network. Is this right, or would it be better to go with a normal hard drive? Either way, we have a lot of data to back up! Do you have any recommendations, or could you point me in the right direction?

The answer to this question has been made open as an example of the Experts Online service. For information on subscribing to Experts Online register your interest here

I have a machine running Windows XP SP2. The CD drive has happily run for many years - until now. I only noticed a couple of days ago, but when you look in Explore you do not see the CD Drive.

If you start the machine in safe mode it can see and read the drive no problemo. when you start in Windows it cannot see the drive. If you go into Device Manager and uninstall it it then "Sees that you have a cd drive - optorite CW5207 but displays the following message

"Windows cannot initialize the device driver for this hardware. (Code 37)"

I have uninstalled and reinstalled it to no avail

I cannot find a more up to date driver (and anyway it worked a treat with this version on Windows until recently)

The only change I have made is to install a brother USB colour printer. I have uninstalled the printer, rebooted and then tried but still no CD Drive

Any suggestions would be warmly welcomed.

Hi

I have just purchased a new web cam for my IBM laptop which is using VISTA as OS. and it wont work, and new drivers are not ready, before i purchase another can you recomend any that will work, i am looking for 1.3 mega pixles if possible

thanks fergus