RM CC4 Compatible hardware

[talksr]

Hi,

 

I thought I would come to this forum rather than RM as I may get a more un-biased reply!

 

We have a CC4 network, our current HP systems are almost 8 years old. They have worked reliably and unfortunately, are too old for us to continue with.

I would like to get some replacements, but I note that these days RM only support the hardware they sell which is primarily Dell and Lenovo.

 

RM use in their CC4 system, WDS to help build systems over the network. This is a really helpful feature in a large school and I am keen to keep this functionality, however I fear that if I go with more HP systems, I am going to be disadvantaged as the drivers required, will not be included in RM's Hardware Support Packs.

 

Does anyone have any experience of this? I have taken a look on their site and note that the two (closest to HP) midrange systems they have are:

1. Lenovo ThinkCentre M73 10B4 - Core i5 4430 3 GHz - 4 GB - 500 GB
   
2. Mid-Range Dell Optiplex 3020 Small Form Factor
   

If I were to purchase these systems from another hardware supplier, would the deployment functionality still work?

 

To be frank, I would rather get something a little more powerful with a good warranty. We spent a little on our current HPs and they have done us proud, so I would like to go with a similar approach.

[ICTDirect_Dave]

We've sold all manner of HP, Dell & Lenovo units to schools running RM.

 

It's all been business grade so HP Elite, Dell Optiplex or Lenovo Thinkcenter. We've not had anybody call up with a complication so I assume you'll be just fine

[Crumpet]

You can add Drivers into the RMMC on CC4. I think so long as they're Vista compatible (from what i remember), you should be able to PXE boot to them with CC4.

 

I used to build a vanilla Win 7 stations and then use Double Driver to save the drivers onto a USB so i could import them into the RMMC.

[talksr]

You can add Drivers into the RMMC on CC4. I think so long as they're Vista compatible (from what i remember), you should be able to PXE boot to them with CC4.

 

 

I used to build a vanilla Win 7 stations and then use Double Driver to save the drivers onto a USB so i could import them into the RMMC.

 

You can, but we have had nightmares. It took the poor guys at RM support literally weeks as although the NIC drivers worked, there were various faults with Graphics ones etc, it was just a total nightmare. Would rather install something they 'recommend' as it is less likely to cause issues.

[BFCIT]

Hi,

 

We are also an RM School using CC4.5 and have purchased the mid range dell optiplex 3020, they have been great for us for office/admin use, (not got any in a classroom) but I think they are up to the task of dealing with most school based applications. We also have Toshiba C50 and R50 models that are compatible with CC4 and these represented better value when we purchased our laptops. RM do supply these I believe, but you can always get a quote from another company. You do not have to order the hardware from RM for it to be compatible. I shopped around and managed to get a quote better than that of RMs, RM matched it and we were then happy to proceed. It is worth shopping around especially with budgets being so tight in schools these days. I personally like to consolidate purchasing from as few sources as possible but will always go to lengths when bulk buying for the best possible price.

[Chris_]

We've not had any issues building various different PCs on to our CC4 network with the standard RM build process. We've bought batches of PCs from Stone (Stone provide driver packs and support for RM CC networks), Viglen, and refurb HPs from @ICTDirect_Dave.

[rad]

its not been drivers that are an issue, its the fact they are supplied with a build image which we are having to clean using diskpart before we can build them

 

edited - this applies i think due to the Win 8 image (we have Stone and Ergo)

Edited November 20, 2015 by rad

[Crumpet]

You can, but we have had nightmares. It took the poor guys at RM support literally weeks as although the NIC drivers worked, there were various faults with Graphics ones etc, it was just a total nightmare. Would rather install something they 'recommend' as it is less likely to cause issues.

 

Graphics drivers were often a pain via the RMMC so i'd try and see if it would install the driver via windows update first. There were still the occasional drivers here and there that needed a manual install. It's not a perfect system but i found it for the most part it worked quite well.

 

I guess you need to figure out what's more time/cost effective in terms of buying from RM or going to third parties to purchase PC's.

Edited November 23, 2015 by Crumpet
Typo

[truebluesteve]

We've been using Dell Optplex 3030's for our desktop devices in classrooms and the 3020 elsewhere and they build fine with no need to add any additional drivers (mostly anyway). We use HP for laptops and we have to add a couple of drivers after the build has completed, but its not a big issue. We could actually add them to the build, but just haven't got round to it!

 

Edit - To add, we buy our PC's from various suppliers (although Misco mainly at the moment)

Edited November 23, 2015 by truebluesteve

[bossman]

We have never purchased hardware from RM, we have built our own and also bought refurbished from @ICTDirect_Dave and as long as you have the right NIC drivers your laughing, never had any problems and ICTDirect will let you have a test unit before you purchase so you can be sure, also have purchased some laptops from them just recently and they build onto the network no problem.

 

Give them a shout

[TomHD]

As bossman says, as long as you have the correct NIC driver you'll be unfortunate to have a problem. I have a 3rd party build disk I made myself, it has a load of NIC drivers from all the manufacturers and have yet to find a machine I cannot build from it

 

When I say 3rd party I mean non RM hardware.

Edited November 23, 2015 by TomHD

[Chris_]

its not been drivers that are an issue, its the fact they are supplied with a build image which we are having to clean using diskpart before we can build them

 

edited - this applies i think due to the Win 8 image (we have Stone and Ergo)

 

This is true. On the PCs we've bought from Stone/Viglen we've been able to request that they are loaded with Windows 7 or a blank HDD to save us that task.

[talksr]

Hmm, thought we would have trouble.....

 

We have a large number of HP Elite 8300 Ultra Slim computers. They currently have Windows 8 on them and WDS through CC4 works perfectly in deploying this OS, however when trying to install Windows 10 on them, we get error after error.

 

RM have spent weeks looking into it and have just got back with the following...

 

..."I got update that this can occur due to client communication or driver related issues. Could you please verify whether appropriate windows 10 drivers for HP Elite 8300 Ultra-slim are installed in RMMC ? If not, please contact the vendor for exact windows 10 drivers including WinPE driver so that we can add it to a new build disk and test."

 

I don't believe the Windows 10 drivers are installed on RMMC as nowhere in their guide did it ask for them to be installed, but RM have remotely connected several times to take a look.

 

I have had a look on the HP site, and I can't find any Windows 10 drivers or a WinPE Driver. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

 

Thanks

[supawat1]

I have had an issue with Lenovo ThinkCentre M73 Tiny when I tried to rebuild the machine from PXE boot even through I have added the correct NIC driver. So I had to manually use USB build disk. After successfully built, it kept going to back to PXE boot mode (on the first start).

 

So, I did not have a good experience with the particular model.

 

I would recommend Dell or HP.

[truebluesteve]

Hmm, thought we would have trouble.....

 

We have a large number of HP Elite 8300 Ultra Slim computers. They currently have Windows 8 on them and WDS through CC4 works perfectly in deploying this OS, however when trying to install Windows 10 on them, we get error after error.

 

RM have spent weeks looking into it and have just got back with the following...

 

..."I got update that this can occur due to client communication or driver related issues. Could you please verify whether appropriate windows 10 drivers for HP Elite 8300 Ultra-slim are installed in RMMC ? If not, please contact the vendor for exact windows 10 drivers including WinPE driver so that we can add it to a new build disk and test."

 

I don't believe the Windows 10 drivers are installed on RMMC as nowhere in their guide did it ask for them to be installed, but RM have remotely connected several times to take a look.

 

I have had a look on the HP site, and I can't find any Windows 10 drivers or a WinPE Driver. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

 

Thanks

 

What drivers does Windows 8 use? For example if they are Realtek 86xx or whatever it may be worth heading over their site and seeing if they have up to date driver. We've had to do this in the past.

[talksr]

What drivers does Windows 8 use? For example if they are Realtek 86xx or whatever it may be worth heading over their site and seeing if they have up to date driver. We've had to do this in the past.

 

I had thought of using the Windows 8 drivers for Windows 10, but it would be doing that already through WDS as the same Windows 8 drivers are going to be used for Windows 10 as I have not added any additional ones.

 

We can install Windows 8 on this model of computer with no problem at all.

 

The issue seems to be that HP do not currently offer a Windows 10 driver for this model of computer.

[jonspurs]

Can I just add, whatever PC you buy, make sure they're SSDs...makes a massive difference. Dells come in 128GB which is more than enough for us.

We've OptiPlexs 3020s and 3010s...had manually created drivers and then RM caught up and released a driver pack for them anyway :-)

[ajevanu2]

We use Stone PCs with 128gb ssd's on an rm cc4 network.no real problems and update easily...recommend them price wise and decent warranty. Any issues, onsite next working day to fix/replace...

[Carrot63]

Plus 1 for Stone. Have always built well for us and their support has been very good on the odd occasion we have had an hardware issue. We have also built the Zoostorm (like the old rmone) machines onto CC4 without any issue. Some of these we bought through RM and some through Misco.

[GeekyPete]

I've worked on RM CC networks for Many years. I've eventually got every computer I've ever come across working as long as I had the right drivers for the OS. You can't build Windows 7 if the laptop only has Windows 8 and up drivers available, like the new Dells. But that's got nothing to do with RM tbf. To echo what @Crumpet said, Double Driver is your friend. Boot it up, harvest the drivers, import to RMMC and that's 90% of the issues fixed. For alternative OS hit the manufacture's website. This is why I buy Tier 1 devices where possible. It's true that sometimes you get a pain in the bum of a driver that won't install and it can take days and days of trial and error trying to get the right one. The first time I had to roll back a Windows 8 laptop to Windows 7 was time consuming too. I Hadn't used DiskPart for a long time up until then.

 

For the most part, it's not too hard. And having seen other build processes I still thing CC4 is about the best out there. I can truly leave it unattended, right up to user log on. You don't realise what a genius interface Assignment Overview is until you live without it. It could be better, I've fed back ideas. But it's elegantly simple.

[Norphy]

To echo what @Crumpet said, Double Driver is your friend

 

If you have Windows 8 or above, there is a PowerShell command which can enumerate and harvest the drivers that you have installed on your PC. The command line is:

 

Get-WindowsDriver -online | Export-WindowsDriver -online -destination %path_to_where_you_want_the_files_stored%

 

You need to run that from an elevated PowerShell prompt. This has proven useful for various tablet computers where getting drivers for things like the digitisers has been a challenge.

[HTCPCP]

Never had had too many issues with builds before, with the exception of some hp laptops. The build had too many versions of a realtek pcie family controller on it. Cant remember the last time i bought from rm and we've not bought from misco for about 3 years. Machine wise we curently have zoostorms, dell 3020s, some HPs that use the same build as the 3020s, some lenovos of varying sorts, and whatever was best value when ordering. We tend to find system builders like zoostorm really easy to build as you can ust go onto the motherboard manufacturers website and download the latest drivers. Usually seems to be gigabyte or msi from our experience

 

I know we have bought devices with oem license, but without windows being installed, which might be of use. All depends on account managers and if it would mess up their systems i suppose...