vista for school laptops

[david12345]

hi which version of vista is best for new school laptops- mainly used by staff, mainly off network but a few connect to network. others used with projectors.most are used at home by staff too.
some use video and music a lot. currently use win xp pro.
i assume vista basic is too basic so that leaves home premium, business and ultimate. latter is more expensive. something called win media centre is in home premium but not business. there are some other differneces listed at
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pro...g_id=10033VHb1
any views?

[Dos_Box]

Business. Anything less will not connect to active directory. Ultimate and premium versions have Windows Media Centre as standard. A completely useless addition to a business machine.

[Michael]

For a school I wouldn't even consider Home Basic or Home Premium. The prime problem is that they cannot connect to a network domain.

Ideally Vista Business or Ultimate is what you should be looking at. Both versions can be connected to a network domain, allowing you to standardise policies, applications and available resources.

Even if laptops are to be used mostly away from the network, it still allows teachers to plug into the network when they're in school. It also allows the laptops to receive anti-virus and wsus updates (for example).

[FN-GM]

Also Vista Enterprise can be added to the domain.

Z

[richard]

The best advice that I can give you is don't use Vista on school machines at present stay with XP. There are still too many problems with it and there are still issues with connecting to a network even for simple things like accessing a users home folder. As for Group Policies I wouldn't even contemplate that..........

[eejit]

The best advice that I can give you is don't use Vista on school machines at present stay with XP. There are still too many problems with it and there are still issues with connecting to a network even for simple things like accessing a users home folder. As for Group Policies I wouldn't even contemplate that..........

When was the last time you used Vista on the network? You can relax now, it's all good. Your post sounds like it was written last February.

The bit that shocked me is your damning of the group policies though, that's the best bit, you can use all the XP policies plus a whole truckload of new useful ones.

I am of course, just talking about putting the Vista OS on the network. Making sure that all your curriculum software works on Vista is another matter.

[richard]

The best advice that I can give you is don't use Vista on school machines at present stay with XP. There are still too many problems with it and there are still issues with connecting to a network even for simple things like accessing a users home folder. As for Group Policies I wouldn't even contemplate that..........

When was the last time you used Vista on the network? You can relax now, it's all good. Your post sounds like it was written last February.

The bit that shocked me is your damning of the group policies though, that's the best bit, you can use all the XP policies plus a whole truckload of new useful ones.

I am of course, just talking about putting the Vista OS on the network. Making sure that all your curriculum software works on Vista is another matter.

The last time I did touch it was last year and had no end of trouble with it and l;ike I said I had no end of problems with it.

[GrumbleDook]

@eejit
If you have chance could you do a little bit about how you added vista machines to your domain, configured them, resources you used to find out how to make it work, etc?

There are still many others with issues with Vista.

[Dos_Box]

Moved to the Vista forum.