Dfe laptops

[Liam]

What Are people doing with the dfe laptops? We are getting them back in skme states?

I believe they fall under our asset register now, would that be true?

I wonder if we could write them off and just give them to the children. Surely that way then they become their responsibility in terms of filtering etc. If we don't own them anymore? Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

Cheers.

 

Liam

[Jcx500]

Added them to our existing trolleys or kept them as spares

[Rob_D]

We enrolled them in our Intune and gave them back to the students (or are in the process of doing so). The ones we got back from Y11s will be distributed to incoming Y7s who don't have access to tech at home.

 

Everything I've read says the laptops are the property of the school/establishment who ordered them from the DfE. So if you got them through the DfE portal direct, ownership resides with the school. If you got them through the LA/CC or some other group (we had one through the Digital School and a couple through child services), then ownership defaults to that organization, and they can choose to transfer ownership to the school or the families. I believe most LAs are kicking ownership down to the schools.

 

Technically if they're yours (as described above), I don't see why you shouldn't be able to write them off and donate them to the families, which would mean you would no longer need to manage or do anything with them. But that potentially a lot of "capital" the school is loosing, so you might to need to be able to make the business case for it.

[Boredguy]

We've had all bar 6 laptops returned so far (and thats because the students were isolating for the last week and a bit of term so they should have been using them, but hadn't since March!)

Just busy reinstalling all of our Geobook to repurpose some of them for Exam use so they just have ExamWritePad installed (since JCQ want laptops to last an entire exam session without being plugged in), some will be going to our SEN unit for some incoming Y7s that apparently need devices (and a few extra for those with broken bones so they are out of my hair at least)

 

Not sure what I'm going to do with the Dell's and HP 250's we got, but everything is being wiped and rebuilt on to our domain (only the first batch of 12 laptops we got were purely DfE configured, rest we had unmanaged so we joined to the network and used AoVPN for filtering)

 

Only devices that were the students were those assigned and provided by the LA to students that were Looked After or had a social worker assigned. Everything else was added to our "asset" register even though they fall below the minimum value.

[Liam]

We got quite a number back. But.. They are soooo poor in school as they are just really poor devices.

I understand that they are owned by us now.. But its a lot of money to keep them going and then the maintenance of them too.

 

Thanks

[hardtailstar]

We have kept some, Some will be going back to the children after they have had filtering sorted out as the government is stopping filtering.

[chris11256]

I'm honestly not sure what I'll do with ours. They certainly won't be going into on site use as they're too low powered. I might just keep them in a pool for students to borrow if they suddenly need to self isolate or something.

[IrritableTech]

About a third of ours are ok for a couple of years in school, the others just aren't up to the job. I hope we can give them away to pupils because it is going to be a big waste of money otherwise.

 

(since JCQ want laptops to last an entire exam session without being plugged in)

 

I've not seen this - happen to have a link?

[aarono]

We are having the laptops back to 'reset' them and then hand them back out again. I want to image them to prevent having to individually setup the local user account on each device and any other software we might want on the device. However, this causes an issue with the windows license as I don't want the laptops picking up on our KMS key then deactivating after months of being offsite.

 

How are others getting around this or are you just resetting to factory settings then manually setting up local accounts etc on each device?

[Rob_D]

We are having the laptops back to 'reset' them and then hand them back out again. I want to image them to prevent having to individually setup the local user account on each device and any other software we might want on the device. However, this causes an issue with the windows license as I don't want the laptops picking up on our KMS key then deactivating after months of being offsite.

How are others getting around this or are you just resetting to factory settings then manually setting up local accounts etc on each device?

 

We just stick a factory windows image on them and it picks up the machine license fine. At one point we looked at using clonezilla to copy over a sysprepped image with basic stuff pre-setup, but now we're just using intune. Students get the laptop OBE and log in with their school 365 account at setup. Seems to be working great.

 

Can't you just put a mac key in the image? In fact you should be able to do an MDT task sequence that doesn't domain join and sets up a local user account.