Laptop trolleys - Do they ever work?

[_techie_]

In my 20 years of running IT in various schools, I have never had great success running laptop trolleys running Windows.

Windows Updates, students not shutting them down properly, use of low end hardware that can barely run Windows, let alone an application are all issues. Even running Intune and setting profile removal after 60% of disk usage doesn't seem to be working due to student profiles being often 1.5-3GB in size.

 

Is 1:1 devices the only solution? Certainly it feels like it, as my own laptop never suffers from these issues.

 

We started by doing Chromebook trolleys at my last school, and they worked great, but my new workplace is entirely Windows based. Is anyone using Chromebooks in a Windows dominated environment?

 

Thoughts please?

[Rob_D]

Our trolleys work pretty well. The trick is to buy good laptops to start with and have a team/member of staff who has ownership and a vested interest in making sure they're working. In my experience Library or Curriculum area based trolleys work best.

[_techie_]

In a normal domain environment I would have setup delprof to run at startup to keep things clean. Doing nice easy scripting seems to be a ton harder on Intune, for very little gain. Would you recommend 256Gb storage as minimum for ease of operation? Our Lenovo 100e units have 64Gb and once all apps etc are installed, we are looking at over 50Gb leaving little space for profiles.

[jmak]

At my last school we used Chromebooks successfully in a Windows domain environment. I used Azure AD Connect to provision Goggle accounts and then in the Google admin console set the default login domain. That meant that the username and password were the same for both Windows clients and Chromebooks. I also set up SSO to the O365 accounts so that they could access OneDrive and SharePoint. I'm a big fan of Chromebooks, but they don't do everything a Windows laptop will. You need to work out the requirements in detail

 

With laptop trolleys, you really need someone who takes ownership. We put them in form rooms for primary schools - most lessons were in the form room and teachers and pupils seemed to be motivated to make sure they were out away and charged. I could then reliably set the laptops to update overnight as I was confident they'd be plugged in.

[hardtailstar]

Our trolleys work pretty well. The trick is to buy good laptops to start with and have a team/member of staff who has ownership and a vested interest in making sure they're working. In my experience Library or Curriculum area based trolleys work best.

This!

 

We have a mixture of windows laptops and Chromebooks. The ones looked after by department TAs are in better condition than the ones that are a free for all.

 

Finding a good source of spare parts is another must!

[_techie_]

With laptop trolleys, you really need someone who takes ownership. We put them in form rooms for primary schools - most lessons were in the form room and teachers and pupils seemed to be motivated to make sure they were out away and charged. I could then reliably set the laptops to update overnight as I was confident they'd be plugged in.

 

We are a large secondary school with no Department TAs to do this kind of work...

[jthompson]

Our Windows laptop trolleys have always disappointed, mainly because Windows updates can put grit in the gears, which can then lead to keys being picked off, etc. if students get bored and frustrated. One department had much more success than the rest of the school, for some reason. I suspect it was a combination of them getting a goldilocks amount of use (enough to avoid updates piling up, but not so much to end up with low batteries) and the layout of the department being more conducive to staff taking care of them. The trolleys were stored in the department office, rather than in the cupboard of one particular classroom, and all department members seemed to use them about the same amount, which perhaps fostered a culture of shared responsibility that was missing in other areas of the school.

 

We've had noticeably more success with Chromebook trolleys around school though, due to better battery life, more compact designs and faster start-up.

[Rob_D]

Would you recommend 256Gb storage as minimum for ease of operation? Our Lenovo 100e units have 64Gb and once all apps etc are installed, we are looking at over 50Gb leaving little space for profiles.

Our minimum is 128GB storage, which gives us a reasonable overhead, but it depends on your image. 256GB should be plenty unless you have some really big programs, I'd just look to have about 40% (or more) free space after you've got everything installed.

[hallb15]

It's the lack of ownership and therefore lack of responsibility with shared trolleys that causes issues - if a laptop doesn't work, it just gets put back in the trolley and no-one reports it.

 

In our second building, we've moved away from shared trolleys to putting 10 laptops in a charging cabinet in each classroom. This gives the teacher ownership so any faults are reported quickly and therefore resolved more efficiently. We're a three form primary school so each year group can pool their laptops if a class needs 1:1 devices for a lesson. So far it is going well.

 

Educating staff and pupils on how to wait for the laptop to shutdown completely BEFORE shutting the lid has really helped here as a lot of issues seemed to stem from this. We've even gone as far as having laptop 'rules' printed on the laptop lids to remind people how to shutdown properly. (Thanks @VeryPC)

 

Buying laptops with larger SSDs will ease the running out of space due to old profiles issues, however you're only delaying the inevitable and it can bump the price up quite considerably.

[Cat_Jam148]

Primary here so will be a little different but...

 

Never really had any issues with our 3 shared laptop trolleys in the 10 years I've been here.

 

Our classes generally get the laptops out a few minutes before needing them to deal with the Windows updates - as someone said above, good specs are key. Even our weakest machines are all minimum of i3s with 256gb SSDs and 8GB RAM. I would hate to run any of the DFE spec'd machines for daily classroom use.

 

Regarding the shutdown issues, I bit the bullet and just set them to shutdown when the lid is closed, which also helps with the Windows updates. I expected it to cause issues with lost work, but I can't recall it ever being an issue.

 

I do count myself quite lucky here as almost all of our staff understand the importance of looking after our equipment, so our trolleys are returned with the majority, if not all, plugged in and on charge.

[LeMarchand]

2 of my sites are Windows for Staff, shared Chromebooks in trolleys for pupils. The better battery life seems to make it work well and, probably because SMT are a bit stricter, the Chromebooks tend to be properly stored.

 

The other is Windows for staff with a suite, Windows trolleys and literal piles of Chromebooks, Windows laptops and iPads for pupils. Despite me pushing for some sort of bookable "box" system SMT won't lay down the law so it seems to be "grab whatever you can find with a charge and complain that the IT provision is rubbish".

[DavR]

The trolleys work pretty well for us here, although when I started they were in a pretty dire state. It's cost a lot of time and money to bring them round.

 

We have a trolley of 15 or 30 devices in each year group (primary), which has the benefit that the year group (four class teachers, in our case) has a responsibility to look after their own devices. Ownership is key to getting things looked after. It also helps that I've spent the last 5+ years making sure that ALL devices are uniform, maintained, and available as much as possible. When people see that the technology has improved, and is working and maintained, they're more likely to respect and care for it. But it all boils down to the culture in your school, of course, and some people will always be careless, mindless, idiots (and that's just the adults).

 

We've mostly moved towards Chromebooks in our trolleys, so management wise they're a lot simpler and a lot more reliable and available, as updates happen in the background.

 

We have kept one trolley of Windows devices though, and what I've found works well on these is:

• Force shutdown when lid is closed
  
• Force Windows updates in the background, but disable reboot notifications so children don't see them
  
• Logging of last user, to help trace devices that inevitably wonder off
  

 

What's also been helpful I've found is really strict cable management. Where the devices charge off the standard mains power bricks, these are locked down to the extent the only user accessible wires are the 20cm required to plug in to the laptop and charge. No more power bricks wandering off, and minimises cable tangle messes.

Edited April 29, 2022 by DavR

[DavR]

In a normal domain environment I would have setup delprof to run at startup to keep things clean. Doing nice easy scripting seems to be a ton harder on Intune, for very little gain. Would you recommend 256Gb storage as minimum for ease of operation? Our Lenovo 100e units have 64Gb and once all apps etc are installed, we are looking at over 50Gb leaving little space for profiles.

 

A 64GB drive is near useless on a Windows device IMO. We received a few with 64GB (Dell 3100) from the last of the DfE scheme, and they wouldn't even install our base image and program list.

 

Definitely 256GB as a minimum.

[3s-gtech]

We’ve managed to make 64GB drives work (just about to hit the ten year mark, remember when we all thought SSDs wouldn’t stick it?!) with a reasonable Windows image, but slim profiles have been the key. Still wouldn’t spec that now - all our new machines have 128GB which is stingey but not my choice to make.

 

256GB+. Fastest possible wifi for areas with trollies to give them half a chance - AX is working out okay for us. Thankfully we have been able retire everything on 802.11n.

[msi_school]

We moved to 256GB for our staff laptops and all desktops about 18 months ago and it is better but our student laptops are Stone Cloudbooks with 64GB disks this is restrictive and requires regular Delprofing I don't think we will be able to use disks this small for much longer.

 

As for the condition of the devices it varies, the Library and Science do best but they have dedicated staff to issue equipment and check it on return so you would expect this. I am lucky that my Business manager supports me in charging departments who have kit damaged when it is in their custody so the teachers at least have some skin in the game.

[psydii]

4 cores/ 4 gb ram / 64Gb storage (intune shared device config)

or

4+ cores / 16Gb Ram / 512 Gb Storage (traditional AD, MEMCM)

 

Anything in between (or below) those specs, for shared laptops, do not work well for us.

 

Intune managed devices seem to manage to handle their updates overnight without problems.

MEMCM devices are configured to hold off from updates until we take the set out of circulation and open up a maintenance window.

 

Ownership of the devices is key. after 15 years departments have learned that there really will be no additional IT Suite offered instead of the trolleys so they have to make them work. It should be noted that before they learned this lesson, they also didn't manage to look after their IT Suites either, so we had hard data to support our assertion that it was staff apathy rather than a fundamental technical flaw that was the route cause of issues. (c.f. with other departments that instinctively looked after their IT Suites/Devices and comparatively had 'no' issues.).

 

1:1 is also reliant on ownership, personal responsibility, and collectively a culture that expects issues with devices to be reported and resolved promptly, but those values are easier to instil when the end user is paying for the device.

Edited May 3, 2022 by psydii