Most questions to our technical support team are answered below. If you can't find an answer to the problem or question that you have, please contact us and we'll be glad to help out.

Phone: 877-370-5546
E-mail: support@lanschool.com

Question: Why don't the students appear in the LanSchool Console?
There are usually four potential reasons why this can happen:

1. Verify that there are no personal firewalls blocking the LanSchool port. LanSchool configures the Microsoft Firewall that comes with Windows XP SP2, but there are too many personal firewalls for us to configure all of them automatically.

2. Check to see if you have two or more Network Interface Cards (NICS). The easiest way to check this is to go into the options menu, network tab and select the appropriate NIC.

3. Verify that the teacher and student computers are on the subnet. If they are on different subnets then Multicast or a Subnet Directed Broadcast must be enabled in the LanSchool Options dialog box.

If this does resolve the problem, please contact us.

4. If you are using a CISCO wireless access point, turn off the port-protection policy setting that blocks peer-to-peer traffic.

Question: What impact does LanSchool have on the network?
One of LanSchool's strengths is the efficient screen capture and transfer methods. If the whole teacher's screen is changing LanSchool only uses around 24K/sec. This is less than 1% of a 100 MB network. Because we use a broadcast packet, the bandwidth consumed is the same with 2 computers as with 200 computers. The bandwidth used by many of the competitors will actually increase with every computer on the network.

Question: What impact does LanSchool have on the performance of the student machines?
In our testing, LanSchool generally consumes 1/2 of the processing requirements of the competitors and a 1/4 of their memory requirements. In high load situations, LanSchool uses about 4% of the processor and near 6 MB of memory on the client.

Question: How many websites can I allow or block?
The number of websites you can allow or block depends on the size of the URLs. The total amount of characters you may type in each dialog box is about 1000. The block and allow features are not meant to replace your Internet content filter. We recommend using the allow feature to restrict students to a small number of websites for a particular lesson.

Question: Can I allow or block certain websites if I'm using Firefox or another browser?
If you are using Firefox or a browser other than Internet Explorer you can block ALL web browsing, but you cannot block or allow certain sites.

Currently the block and allow certain sites features are only available on Internet Explorer. If you have multiple browsers in your environment and you would still like to allow certain websites, we recommend putting iexplore.exe in the allowed applications list and blocking the other browsers like firefox.exe.

We are investigating ways to add the block and allow features to Firefox.

Question: How do I upgrade to the latest version?
Current customers can now contact LanSchool and receive a username and password to the LanSchool Customer Portal. This portal will always contain the latest upgrade that you are eligible to receive. To upgrade, login to the customer portal, download the .zip file, extract it and follow the instructions for upgrading clients in the LanSchool v7.1 Installation Manual.

Question: Can I remote control multiple computers at once?
If all of the computers in the lab then you can remote control all of the computers at the same time. This is a great time saving feature if you need to do the same thing to all of the computers at once.

Question: What is an Enterprise Class Access Point?
Consumer access points are generally not robust enough to handle consistent traffic to more than 5 clients. Enterprise class access points are designed to support 50 or more clients at the same time and generally sell for around $300 dollars. Our favorite is the HP 420, but similar products are produced by Dell, Cisco or IBM. This will benefit not only LanSchool, but general student computing as well.

Question: What settings work best on a wireless access point?
If you wish to improve performance, you can optionally attempt to configure your
Access Point. Since this differs from vender to vender, we can only give general
guidelines. You'll have to consult your Access Point's manual to see how to actually
make the change on your particular Access Point.

1. Drop the Beacon Interval as low as possible (generally, this can go down to 50ms).
2. Set the DTIM to ZERO. (This allows broadcast and multicast packets to be sent after EVERY beacon packet.)
3. Increase the Broadcast or Multicast speed. (Not all APs allow this to be set)

Question: What if I suspect that someone is using an unauthorized LanSchool Teacher console?
It is very rare that a student uses an authorized console, unless you've given them access to the console program. However if you suspect that someone has the Teacher Console, there is a utility on the CD called security.exe. This program logs all LanSchool activity and can help you quickly identify unauthorized consoles. Once students know that this tool is in use, unathorized activity stops quickly.

In LanSchool v7.1 you can watch the security messages in the status window.

Question: Can the LanSchool installation be scripted?
Yes, the install can be scripted to run silently from a login script. The command-line paramaters are listed in the installation documentation. The LanSchool student and teacher software can also be installed with the included .MSI file.

Question: Can you run two teacher consoles on the same channel?
Yes at no additional cost. However, it is recommended that one console monitor the students while the other console perform actions such as blanking screens, showing the teacher screen, etc.

Question: Can I group channels?
Yes. In LanSchool v7.1, all 16,000 channels can now be grouped. This is available in the Options dialog on the Network tab.

Question: Does LanSchool support Multicast?
Yes. If your switches support Multicast or Subnet Directed Broadcasts, then LanSchool can be configured to take advantage of these protocols. Multicast can be configured through the configure menu item.

Question: Does LanSchool work with programs such as Ghost and Deepfreeze?
Yes, these are both great programs and are compatible with LanSchool. With Ghost we recommend an image per lab or change the channel with a batch file. In a lab, it is critical that the Teacher channel and the Student channels are the same. With Deepfreeze you must "Thaw" before installing LanSchool. After LanSchool is installed you can "Freeze" the PC.

Question: Can students uninstall LanSchool?
The only way to uninstall LanSchool is with the original CD. It cannot be uninstalled through the Add/Remove programs group.

Question: Can you send and retrieve files from the students' desktop?
Yes! You can specify the destination folder for file transfer on the Teacher machine. Click Options and go the Student tab. At the bottom is a section titled "LanSchool Folder on Student". If you wish to send the files to the student's desktop, add the following:

C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Desktop

Note: %username% is case sensitive

Question: Does the trial version interact with the real version of LanSchool?
No, the 30-day trial will not run after 30 days and it doesn't interact with the real version of LanSchool. However, you may use the real version of LanSchool v7.1 to upgrade the demo version from the teacher computer.

Question: What are the system requirements for LanSchool v7.1?
Click here to see the system requirements.

Question: How do I upgrade to the latest version and what is the cost?
All customers are eligible for free minor revision upgrades. For example, if you purchased v7.0 you are eligible to receive v7.0.3.5 for free.

All customers have one year of upgrade protection for major revisions from the time of purchase. For example, if you purchased v7.0 and within a year we release v7.1 then you would be eligible for a free upgrade. If it is outside of a year, then upgrade pricing applies.

To request an upgrade, e-mail support@lanschool.com. Send us your contact information including your name, e-mail, phone #, the organization name, certificate number and your current version of LanSchool.