Primary School In place upgrade for Staff Machines Win 7 > 10

[hardware]

Hi

 

Working with a primary school at the moment they have around 7 admin machines (Head/Finance/admin/bursar etc) all on windows 7 they have Stuff like SIMS and other admin related software

 

Will be planning to get them all upgraded to Windows 10 at the moment, will do an In place upgrade from 7 > 10 Hopefully for this

 

Is the best thing to do is use the Media Creation Tool for this?

 

Wiping everything out and doing it from scratch is going to be really time consuming as they use local profiles and some of these staff members have a habit of saving stuff to desktop and profiles can exceed 5gb > (Not good practise i know but it is how it is!)

 

Or anyone else have any tips or methods for upgrading admin machines? or has anyone had any issues

[Guest Guest]

Personally I'm very reluctant to use in place upgrades. I'd enable folder redirection so all docs etc are copied to a server and reimage

[6Foot2]

I was working on a similar project for a primary school while I was working in Southwark.

 

As I was visiting this school a half a day a week, and as the machines weren't always available for me to work on when I visited the project was going to take a few weeks to complete.

 

I had started by moving some peer-to-peer shared resources to the machine of the Head's PA (It was the machine that was least likely to be turned off) I left a message with the Head's PA, to be given to the Head, stating the progress of my work so far.

 

Sadly, the message was not transferred and when teachers complained that they could not find their resources I was banned from returning to the school.

 

[LeMarchand]

I'm in a similar situation at one of my schools. As well as the "unique" filing, the tend to have weird unusual programs. Considering P2V-ing the existing machines and copying them to the W10 builds with a desktop link to the VM.

[steveg]

Upgrading in place is always going to result in a slightly slower user experience overall, wiping and imaging them is def the best way to do this. What have you done for upgrading all the other computers in the school?

 

It would be an ideal time to try to put an end to the bad practice of saving things on local computers. There are numerous reasons not to do this, backups being the main one, but also data protection - the server will be in a secure room (hopefully) whilst an admin pc would be considerably easier to steal, along with all the data on it.

[3s-gtech]

I have quite a few machines that were in-place upgraded from 7. Most work fine - but a warning - often the local profiles were full of bugs and quirks afterwards, and I had to clear them anyway.

[hardware]

Upgrading in place is always going to result in a slightly slower user experience overall, wiping and imaging them is def the best way to do this. What have you done for upgrading all the other computers in the school?

 

It would be an ideal time to try to put an end to the bad practice of saving things on local computers. There are numerous reasons not to do this, backups being the main one, but also data protection - the server will be in a secure room (hopefully) whilst an admin pc would be considerably easier to steal, along with all the data on it.

 

Thanks guys for the input

 

For Curriculum Machines ones connected to smart board and student devices we will just wipe them fresh and put a new image of Win 10 on them

 

The admin machines school is adamant to do an inplace upgrade for them

[ITGURU]

Every desktop and server always gets a clean install at upgrades. I always warn staff that anything they've saved to the local disk will be wiped, so don't take responsibility for anything which is lost.

Staff can save to the desktop, but i carry out checks now and again to see how big profiles are and if need be advise staff to remove any files.

[XiJ]

We’ve often found admin machines to be the biggest effort / issue. Because often setup to save locally and even have the sims database and all its integrations. Urgh.

I try and use upgrade time to move the schools away from this and do a clean install. Short term pain, long term gain.

[Guest Guest]

I didn't find our Admin machines much of an issue, there documents have always been redirected and therefore are backed up daily. There pretty much a standard PC with the addition of SIMS, FMS and egress switch. Yet to sort the Exam software on the business managers pc but that's not needed yet

[mproffitt1983]

We backup the C:\users folder before we wipe admin machines. We do inform staff that data saved to the desktop isn't backed up but we still get a few files now and then - we would then dump the files in their home directory or wait until they realize they're missing something.

 

We use the following script.

 

net use w: \\networksharepath

w:

md %computername%

robocopy c:\users\ w:\%computername%\ /MIR /XA:SH /XD AppData /XJD

net use w: /delete

pause