Liz Kwantes, a Cookham Rise Primary School governor unpacks the server

They have been given most of the computers by the Chartered Institute of Marketing, who were upgrading some of their machines, which greatly helped with the limited funds that the school had available. It allowed them to spend the money on a Dell server, which will act as the 'boss' to all the other computers that will be linked into it. Eventually Kate Littlefield, the headteacher would like to have fifteen machines, thus allowing two pupils per machine. The school is very lucky in that they have had five new classrooms built last summer and one of these is being set up as a dedicated computer room.

Headteacher, Kate Littlefield, and Richard Dawson with a pile of cables. Let's get them connected.

So it was bright and early on April Fool's Day that Kate Littlefield, the headteacher of Cookham Rise, Liz Kwantes, one of the school's governors who is responsible IT, and Richard Dawson from the Chartered Institute of Marketing assembled to create the school's new computer room. The room had already been cabled up to allow the computers to be linked to the server, power had been installed and there were a selection of computers and screens of different ages and states of repair, with no proper software on them, scattered around the room.

Goodbye to the failed hardware

Richard had brought along a large box of tools, discs and CD ROMs and everyone was ready to start. A CD was put into one of the computers and nothing happened, the drive was broken. The set up diskette was then tried and it was found to have an error on it. After tries in several other machines, it was decided that it really did not work. Luckily two new computer boxes had been delivered, so they were unpacked and set up, so new set up discs could be created. Firstly though they needed to have network cards installed in them so they could 'talk' to the server. Craig, a friend of Richard, then came along to help. It was at this point that Richard discovered that the network cards he had brought with him were not compatible with the new machines. Set up discs were created, having searched the school bursar's office to find some spare ones and a network card was found. Cables then had to be have the connectors put on to them, all the machines had to be set up with Windows and then all networked together.

Can we get this CD ROM to work?

It was definitely time for a bacon and egg sandwich, which Kate went off to buy. Then one of the screens did not work, some one had left a lock on a floppy drive so it could not be opened and the key did not fit.

However, slowly everything started to happen and just before 4.00pm the network was completed, word processors, spreadsheets and desk top publishers had been installed on each machine and everything was ready for Monday morning for the children of Cookham Rise Primary School to embark on their ICT training. Mr Blunkett should be proud.

Cookham Rise Kids say Thanks!