Teaching Generation Z

Team members will either be heartened or dismayed by my rising frustration with the install of the ActivBoards and their associated peripherals. The big issue is the way our laptops are communicating (or failing to) with the projectors. At present, only one team member, Suzanne, has a laptop that will get a display through to the projector. And considering that most of our laptops started off in a promising way, who knows what the final outcome will be. At first, I was convinced that it was the VGA outlet that was faulty and so I took the offending laptop back to its manufacturer (just got to love those back to base warranties!) and sure enough the guy behind the warranty counter plugged it into a flat panel to test my claims. It didn't work so he told me that the chassis would need to be replaced. It turns out that everything in a laptop is interconnected which means that basically the whole thing needed to be replaced. He said to leave it with him so that all of the data would be transferred to a new machine AND that he would ring me the next day.
Well, the installers started putting in the ActivBoards and problems started emerging when I tried connecting other laptops. So, today I hauled all of the laptops back into town where it was demonstrated on all of the laptops that they were fine, accepted a signal to an external monitor (same deal as a projector) so I brought them back, none the wiser. My next move will be to contact the ActivBoard vendors to get one of their techies out next week to sort though the issue. So, I've done as much as I can with the limited technical knowledge I have - it's time to consult some experts so we can get on with using the ActivBoards for their intended purpose, teaching.