School Computer Lab Computer Check-Out/Circulation

I'm the Technology Manager for a middle-school/high-school with approximately 250 students. We currently have 150 macbooks and 50 imacs available. The imacs are in 2 50-mac labs and the macbooks are distributed in mobile carts throughout the school. I keep a supply of roughly 10 macbooks on-hand for individual sign-out when a student needs to use a computer but the rest of a class section doesn't need a whole cart. Does anybody know of an application that can track these types of transactions. I'm looking for something along the lines of a library circulation system. Each student has an id that I can scan with a barcode reader. I then scan the barcode on a macbook and it is "checked out" to that student and unavailable to anyone else. When the student returns the macbook, it is "checked in" and returned to the generally circulating inventory. It seems like such a simple and obvious thing, but I haven't found anything that is designed for this.
Thanks,
Christopher Tawes
[email protected]

I'm not sure if it's the "best" solution, but here's "Readerware", which is a library checkout software suit that's built for most major OS's (Win, Mac, Linux, Palm, etc.).
http://www.readerware.com/referli1.html?AG5

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Hi John,
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I hope you have Apple Remote Desktop, otherwise you have a lot of work to do.
Use Terminal to look for app store receipts…
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http://kb.linksys.com/Linksys/ukp.aspx?vw=1&docid=bf9526ef1fbf4b0e8dbaecb48950d7e8_3769.xml&pid=80&r...
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Thank you for answering my question earlier Mr. Rice. Now I need to get back to my assignments. bye.

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Hey there!
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Greetings,
I hope somebody is familiar with this problem and can offer a solution that I can forward to my school district's tech support, because it's near imposible to teach video editing with PE8 in its current state.
I teach AV Production Tech and Graphic Design at a public school in Texas. We just got a brand new computer lab with 26 new HP Z-something's...not sure of the number but they are i5 processors with 8GB of ram running W7 Pro at 64 bits with nVidia...again..I don't know the numbers (I'm typing from home. . ) but they are very fast video processors with as much ram as you can get, ordered specifically from one of the HP Ad's on Adobe's website . Everything else Adobe runs splendidly and lighting fast - even real time 3D video in Photoshop! But. . . Premeire Elements 8 is close to being completely dysfunctional. On the computers where it doesn't crash (as often), it runs horribly sluggish. This happens regardless of project specs. Even NTSC DV project files without any video at all - just titles and text - clunks along painfully slow with frustratingly long lags between clicks, drags and other mouse commands. And then, typically on 3 or 4 other random computers in the lab there will be one or both of the following problems: 1) You can't launch the program at all. It acts like it's going to launch, but then gets stuck in the taskbar and you can't get it out, or 2) Everytime you try to enter text, it crashes entirely. I guess I should ad a 3rd and that would be crashing for no appearant reason at all.
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As Bill says we get very few reports of success using PRE across a network. It also doesn't help that PRE8 was generally considered a bit of a disaster - even when running standalone.
You don't mention the configuration of your hard disks - they can also aggravate problems if you don't have a lot of free defragmented space (minimum for success is 30GB - I go for 60GB).
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Cheers,
Neale
Insanity is hereditary, you get it from your children

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Oh alright -- I manage to resolve my own stupidity quite abruptly, actually.
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School Computer Lab Computer Check-Out/Circulation

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