Speed Up Computers on wide scale.

[DrBeaker]

Or get the money for just one upgrade for a vocal teacher and use that to prove the value of spending for all the others.

 

That would be my approach as well. If you have a spare SSD you can do some side by side comparison to build a case for the larger upgrade project.

 

I third this approach. Short version - I'm in a similar position to yourself. Through under-funding, mismanagement etc the school I'm now at has some MAJOR IT problems. I flat out told the head if he didn't do anything about it the kids would fail their exams down to them.

Inbetween all of this I've got a member of staff who is a willing guinea pig and every improvement I've made to the IT systems, he has been a willing partner in. As such he's supporting my point of view (from a teaching aspect) that the changes I'm making are working and therefore I need the funds to do it. i.e. he was first to get a new machine and then tell the other teachers how much better it's made his lessons. Then trying dual-screens and again him then telling the other teachers how much better it's made his lessons. Unfortunately this is the PR side of the IT job within schools as SLT etc don't understand the consequences of old kit and the benefit of the new kit. Call me cynical - but I believe that's because most teachers/SLT have gone straight into teaching and not from industry/other sectors etc in life to get that other viewpoint.

Edited May 1, 2019 by DrBeaker

[mikeprice]

Call me cynical - but I believe that's because most teachers/SLT have gone straight into teaching and not from industry/other sectors etc in life to get that other viewpoint.

 

Totally agree - I could pretty much always tell which teachers had gone school - college - uni - school from the ones that had a 'real job' outside a school environment. They often had a much wider view of what is possible and were much better at seeing things from all angles - rather than just a teachery angle.

Not always - I worked with some that defied the concept but it was generally true.

 

The trouble I have had over the years trying to get people to use dual screens is just silly!!.

[rich_tech]

Totally agree - I could pretty much always tell which teachers had gone school - college - uni - school from the ones that had a 'real job' outside a school environment.

 

My dad who was a caretaker at the school I worked in christened that “School Gate Syndrome” and you could always tell them easily enough too, your right.

 

Reading the thread delprof and ssds are your best bet for quick wins and a min amount of ram across the board of 4gb

[FN-GM]

I think we all need to take a step back. It might not be a hardware issue. The OP states that this has happened since installing Windows 10. From my experience this alone hasn't made PC's slower. It could be something is not configured properly. Maybe DNS?

 

@LukeAdl - What are the specs of the computers please? Ram, Processor, Hard Drive etc?

[3s-gtech]

Agreed, as fab as SSDs are it’s worth doing a sweep of DNS settings and configuration as well as GPs and any potential network bottlenecks.

[strawberry]

I think we all need to take a step back. It might not be a hardware issue. The OP states that this has happened since installing Windows 10. From my experience this alone hasn't made PC's slower. It could be something is not configured properly. Maybe DNS?

 

@LukeAdl - What are the specs of the computers please? Ram, Processor, Hard Drive etc?

 

This, the faults could be software, gpo, hardware, network, drivers, profile size. We've seen no diagnosis to suggest disk speed is the issue.

[DrBeaker]

This, the faults could be software, gpo, hardware, network, drivers, profile size. We've seen no diagnosis to suggest disk speed is the issue.

 

I have some brand new computers that are

 

* i5-8500 CPU @ 3.00GHz, 3000 Mhz, 6 Core(s)

* 8GB RAM

* 256GB M2 SSD

* W10

* Office 2016

 

and still sometimes the disk usage hits 100% still at times. I suspect the culprit in this case is the Trend AV software. Just because we've got newer hardware doesn't mean that solves the issues. Also just because we have newer hardware doesn't excuse crappy poor and badly-written software packages running dog slow.

[atcoates]

We have Trend AV and Win10 and haven't seen any issues, so may not be that.

[1TF0rward]

SSD's are the way to go! (Apparently) This is what we are looking at doing.

[Knil92]

You might want to check system temps. I've had a fair few hp products overheat on me before, so putting an extra fan in the tower might keep it cooler, and stop it from thermal throttling. Just a thought.

[chazzy2501]

I found that our ESET AV was slowing logins down, it was my fault I'd made a small tweak and accidently turned on "scan mapped drives" in the policy default... erk!

[DrBeaker]

Hardware isn't changing as fast any more.

 

Some of the older i3/i5 units with a RAM and SSD upgrade are still very usable with those upgrades. I've got 7-year old HP 8200 SFF's I've upgraded to 8GB RAM and an SSD - and they're fairly nippy. The ones I've done I don't have any complaints. It's going to cost £2K for upgrades to some kit I've got planned. But that's nothing compared to using old machines and sitting there just waiting for an old computer to finish loading.

[dapaulio]

Have they been slow from the beginning or have they become slow in that 3month time period?

Yes SSD and increased Ram will speed up the computer ability to deal with requests however if you have problems with for example switching, group policies, server etc then no local pc upgrade will fix your slowness.

You need to focus really on narrowing down what is causing the slowness.

Is it across all computers on the network or is it across a certain switch?

What’s your core switch health like? Look for bottle necks. Any errors in transmission receiving packets?

How are your servers and storage array configured?

Try putting a computer in a blocked inheritance ou with only the necessary group policies applied.

You mention login times are one to two minutes, that in my opinion is slow. How are your profiles set up. Do you have startmenu and desktop redirection or cached.

You also mention files taking ages to load. Have you checked your storage array for any errors / failures or is it within OneDrive?

Edited May 4, 2019 by dapaulio

[disk]

A couple of thoughts.

 

1) Did you try updating the BIOS on these systems?

2) How did you image/upgrade them?

 

My guess is you may not be running the best set of drivers. If you are imaging with something like SCCM, verify you have the latest driver pack for that model.

[ITGURU]

We replaced all teaching room PCs with 120gb SSDs - £35 a pop and a huge difference noticed by staff. In terms of start up times the quads with ssds outperform the i7's with HDDs!

cheap and chearful upgrade well worth it.

[DrBeaker]

We replaced all teaching room PCs with 120gb SSDs - £35 a pop and a huge difference noticed by staff. In terms of start up times the quads with ssds outperform the i7's with HDDs!

cheap and chearful upgrade well worth it.

 

Did you upgrade the RAM at the same time out of interes? Or just spring for the SSDs?

 

What amount of RAM do those systems have? I'm trying to decide myself between the SSD OR the RAM upgrade, as I don't think we're going to be able to afford both.

[ITGURU]

just SSD. they have 4gb ram!

[DrBeaker]

just SSD. they have 4gb ram!

 

Would you mind if I asked which ones you went for? I've got my eye on the Kingston 240GB ones from Amazon as they're about £25. used them in another job and seemed fine for getting most bang for your bucks.

I want to upgrade ours before rebuilding them as Windows 10 during the summer.

[ITGURU]

think they were the 120gb v300 initially then changed to v400 model. are you looking at the cheaper A model?

[DrBeaker]

think they were the 120gb v300 initially then changed to v400 model. are you looking at the cheaper A model?

 

I'm looking at these purely due to numbers required. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingston-SA400S37-240G-Solid-State/dp/B01N5IB20Q/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2QDJ4T5D2P237&keywords=kingston+ssd&qid=1557774457&s=gateway&sprefix=kingst%2Caps%2C206&sr=8-3

 

We've used the old Kingston model in our sixth form at an old job (looks like the V series yes) and the difference was amazing. Yes they're not high end SSDs like Samsung etc, but they're going into PCs that are 7x years old so I expect the SSD to outlast the PC now.

[ITGURU]

about the same as our's then. pc's are 7+ years old and was easiest way to bring lease of life. they've been in 2 years and had zero failures. expect to do the students pcs on a dead hdd swap. just expect the motherboards to start failing next as recently had 11 year old servers with capacitors finally pop.

[ITGURU]

I think the A series are just lower rated MTBF.