Windows XP. How are you moving beyond it?

[Little-Miss]

Blimey, with everything that has gone on at school i hadnt even considered it. The fact that i have a whole key stage to buy IT for, maybe its time i considered it.

[plexer]

The top 3 for me.

Ben

[nephilim]

Little miss, its definitely worthwhile to do, a fair few benefits with upgrading.

Jamman as above, I'd you can push forward why not. If a machine dies replace it with a w7 machine to get people used to it. Have a 2008r2 server as well and enjoy :-)

[elsiegee40]

The main reason to do it is that XP goes out of support in April 2014... it's been the fact I've been throwing at our governors for the last 18 months to try to ensure that we do actually have migration plans in place.

[MatthewL]

We need to move to Windows 7 to make full use of our new kit we are getting. In order to do it properly we need to get some 2008 DC's in and would like to rebuild the domains, well infact we will have to create some new domains soon for the organizations we support and two of them are very pushey so sooner rather than later I think. Until 5 year ago we had NT and 98 plus it all depends on what one person says in our place, but hopefully that will be soon to change.

I have machines that need it to go 64bit to make use of the extra ram in machines, again just time that is needed to get it going. The local LA is moving one office over to Windows 7 in 2 weeks time but they rely on Citrix for their applications so not a big issue for them.

[garethedmondson]

We upgraded our machines to Win7Ent over the Summer holidays. @rich_tech has just finished migrating the machines over. From what I have been told there are two machines still on XP. One of these is for running the DT laser cutter for which we cannot get drivers and the second one is running FMS and we are waiting for instructions from the LEA on what to do here.

It's the best thing we have done.

Gareth

[SYNACK]

When we moved to Vista 3-4 years ago we put in more RAM so the stations would cope, 7 was a snap given its simmilar footprint and distribution method. Some of the oldest machines don't have aero capable GPUs but work fine without it, just slightly less pretty.

[bossman]

Migrated fully to Windows 7 pro in February this year after a year of planning, building and testing, migration took 8 days in total including the client rebuilds and software deployment and on the Sunday we rested.

Planned 6 weeks for fallout after but in just 3 weeks helpdesk was back to normal and the staff were very happy with the move to a different platform.

Had planned for office 2010 roll out these hols but because of other priorities it will have to wait. Have built the package and tested but it is the dialogue with the staff and the training.

[bondbill2k2]

We have around 6 admin machines which were replaced in the summer with new win7 machines, we also replaced almost all tutor room computers with new win7 machines but downgraded to XP for the time being as we are looking at a nice 2008r2 server next year. The admin machines dont have any GPO and use roaming profiles so we dont really do any managment with them or the admin server. My machine is the only win7 curric PC so I can test stuff out, any software brought to use or requests for us to setup gets tested on windows 7 first, if it fails then its not getting used as its pointless getting used to software you wont see in 8months time again.

I've not had any problems really on windows 7 , the inital nightmare of getting the profile setup how I wanteded and I use this workstations group policy managment to setup win7 policys due to our 2003 domain. Those machines purchased in the last few years will be upgraded to 7 when the server change happens. Our older workstations are all due for replacement by summer 2013 including 1 IT suite so it will be gradual in some areas and staff will be the first to use it and learn so they can help pupils better.

[sparker]

We had problems running 7 with 2003 so did the server and all the PCss this summer with WDS. Added a bit of RAM and only had 4 that I couldn't find drivers for (pre 2003 machines) Even have some Dell 260s running ok albeit with W7 graphics cards in them

[FN-GM]

My old school had no XP machines left. This was part of a software upgrade.
My company i work for is rolling out Windows 7 devices (also Server 2008 R2 RDS) to 35,000 machines. The only ones that wont have 7 will be the bank tills, these will be upgraded when they replace the software they use in early 2012.

[gshaw]

We were limited by the DCs as old servers didn't have 2008 driver support... no such worries now that VMWare is in

Our classroom machines are planned as a sweeping upgrade in summer next year, just replaced the older machines that we weren't 100% convinced by driver support so all ready to go on that front. Also needed to make sure tutors have upgraded teaching materials for our classes and are informed of any changes to the config as a result of moving to 7. We use mandatory profiles as well to keep the setup of each machine consistent, not looking forward to doing that thanks to MS' bizarre design changes... hopefully might be able to do it in a VM and restore the snapshot after sysprepping.

Admin machines are a bit more tricky due to the profiles, user home folders and other accumulated junk... also there isn't a particular downtime period for that side so we need to figure out a neat co-existence period despite having completely different folder structures and profiles between the different OS

[SHimmer45]

you can pry XP from my cold dead hands.....

lol seriously, have been looking into migrating and putting things in place for this, if support wasnt being ended for it we would still keep it.

[sonofsanta]

Software being rolled out this summer. I have/had a plan, you see...

I'm just coming up for two years in this school, and when I arrived, some main ICT teaching rooms were running 800MHz Celerons with CRT monitors (and trying to do video editing on them as well ). First summer was therefore the Hardware Upgrade, some 165 new PCs (about 40% of our network) which had obvious and immediate benefits for everyone - tbh, I still love those machines and monitors all these months on, they're cracking bits of kit.

This summer was the Server Upgrade, which I'm working on now - new virtual infrastructure running Hyper-V and 2008R2. Once that is in place, we can then start properly testing Windows 7 and configuring it over many months ready to roll out this summer for the Software Upgrade.

So all staged very carefully to move forward in a timed and orderly manner. We should also be getting 80 new workstations this summer (5 year refresh cycle), which we didn't last summer due to the year before being twice the size, so the plan is that by the time Win7 rolls out, the lowest spec machine will be Core2Duo E7400 with 2GB of RAM - plenty good enough. With EES in place now for Office the upgrade costs should be much more manageable than I was otherwise anticipating as well