Updating hundreds of slow laptops used by children

[jamwatn]

Hello,

 

I have inherited a school with many hundreds of laptops that are used/owned by children that go home and are kept by them (literally one per pupil).

 

The laptops are very slow and often use all of their 4GB RAM running Win10.

 

It has come to my attention that they are all running 1909.. and you can see where this is going.

 

I can't get the laptops back and I expect if I allow updates to them, we would have a lot of complaints when a feature update installs.

 

What would you do to keep these things up to date?

[Julian]

You will need to look very carefully at the agreement between the school and the parents covering the laptops, who is responsible for maintaining / updating the laptop? I would also check about the insurance on the laptops, the insurance company might require that the laptops are kept up to date (or the insurance is void).

 

When I updated the school computers (1903 > 1909 > 20H1 > 20H2 > 21H1 > 21H2), they did not get back the UWP apps that I had removed, so that should be ok for you.

(Weather, skype, movies Video, maps. Solitaire, office Hub, 3d print, phone, Getting Started, 3D view, Alarms, Wallet, Connect, Messenger, people, Camera, Communications, Feedback Hub,

X-box (6 bits), Store, store purchase)

 

Best of Luck

[pantscat]

Assuming that there's some budget for management - I'd suggest looking at InTune... Windows Update for Business.

(https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/protect/windows-update-for-business-configure)

[jthompson]

Are the upgrades from 1909 onwards done via the enablement package updates? I can't remember when those were introduced. If so, the heavy lifting of installing each feature update is already being done by the regular monthly CU updates, which you're hopefully rolling out to them each month anyway. I don't think there's much that will break by doing the upgrades, since Win10 is pretty mature already. The news and weather widget might suddently appear in people's taskbars (I can't remember which release that was), but Group Policy can take care of that easy enough once you've instaled the latest Group Policy templates. Most noticable changes I think are going to be cosmetic changes to the Start menu.