Laptops wirelessly

[Katy]

Ah, I now remember why we don't have mandatory profiles. Win 10 LTSB (v1511) - created a mandatory profile following the technet article and the start menu doesn't work. Clicking it does nothing, pressing the key on the keyboard does nothing. Exactly like this: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-10/160667-windows-10-mandatoy-profile-broken-start-menu.html

@FN-GM did you ever manage to get mandatory profiles on 10 LTSB with working start menus?

[AlanD]

I certainly agree with - "go and see the problem first hand". Sometimes a little more patience and class organisation is helpful. If they dish out laptops and are simultaneously told to open them and logon and wait - then even 3 minutes seems an eternity when no one is doing anything in the classroom - and after two laptops have luckily got to their useable desktop the remainder decide to restart theirs rather than hanging in for another couple of minutes. Better to get the class to collect the laptops and stagger the start up leaving the laptops to the side of their desk while the lesson starts with some other activity. Get the teacher to work with the limitations of wireless technology rather than work against it. I think there is a wide spread misconception that wireless is now so good you can replace fixed ICT suites with cabinets of mobile laptops and its going to work just as well. If you are sharing an AP between two rooms - you might find the second room has next to no 5GHz coverage - or perhaps with band steering - are only getting very low speed connections at 5Ghz. An while a connection to a 2.4Ghz radio next door is OK its limited to a 20MHz channel - and may have co channel interference from other rooms and worse - other laptops in other rooms. A 50Mb/s might seem fine when you test a singe laptop - but remember its not 50Mb/s to every laptop at the same time - and 50 Mb/s to 25 laptops is only 2Mb/s each (and that would be in an ideal world of no packet collisions - so probably more like 1Mb/s in practice) - which is a disaster for anything - except perhaps BYOD. We certainly find 5GHz is pretty poor at getting through our walls and the cost of deploying 1 ubiquity "ac" AP per class room is low enough for it to be a no brainer. And then its just as important to choose laptops with suitable WiFi cards. Ideally I would insist on at least 3 stream cards (often only found in the highest grade laptops) - or change the WiFi cards in the laptops if you buy budget ones. Even with 3 streams and a strong 5GHz signal (which probably means having an AP in every room) you will struggle to get anything like wired performance. Finally take a good look at the power settings. Often a laptop works well when connected to its charger - but disconnected in the classroom the processor works at half speed - and the wireless connections may not even try to connect at 5GHz to save power. Disabling these features brings a helpful relief to logon times - but you will then get complaints the battery charge doesn't last very long in those budget laptops.

[Sheridan]

I've had this before and it can be very much down to classroom management. Here they turn up to the lesson, decide to get the laptops out (all new W10 i5 ssd ones) and by the time they're out the trolley, powered up and logged in at least 10 minutes of the lesson have gone. At the end of the lesson they shutdown as the bell goes and basically throw them back in the trolley without even checking they have shut down.

 

Compare this to another school I visit, and they have quite old netbooks so as the students come into the class the netbooks are on the desk powering up, logging in does take a few minutes but they are prepared for it. Five minutes before the lesson end they are told to shut them down and return them to the trolley before leaving.

 

So ironically the school with the older slower kit never complain, as they have realised there will always be some management of mobile devices when in a classroom situation.

 

Obviously wireless signal and saturation can be an issue but our school has better wireless than the netbook one and guess who complains!