Looking for SW to determine concurrent machines on network?

[JCB]

Hi,

 

We've got several laptop trolleys here in school (one of each year group 2-6, with 16x in each). A couple of the trolleys are struggling with old laptops and in need of hardware refresh. I was looking for a way to check usage patterns to determine whether we need to buy a new set of laptops or if there's a way we can consolidate a couple of the trolleys to share between classes, saving several thousand pounds.

Does anyone know of some software that would enable me to see how many machines are on the network on a given day, week, etc? For tracking purposes I have all network logins reporting user and computer data to individual text logs (so I can see all the machine logons by user, and user logons by machine), but consolidating this into any kind of useful information is proving difficult. I have also recently deployed SCCM (still getting my head around it) and have a historical Spiceworks install that is used more for Helpdesk now than anything system related. Unfortunately we don't have a managed wireless network so not able to pull any reports from there.

 

It would be great when teachers come to me complaining they don't have their 'own trolley' any more if I can then show them simple stats showing how much the laptops were used previously, hence our decision to not replace 1:1.

 

Thanks for any hints or tips you can give. Primary school so cheap/free suits me fine