Windows devices needing refreshing

[Roberto]

Security security security and hardware reliability it's as simple as that nowadays.

 

You need to have a frank sit down with your SLT and give it to them straight, they rely on IT for EVERYTHING nowadays.

 

Go back 5 maybe 8 years ago and I could afford to have a classroom pc out of action for a few days, now it's 1 day before the "affecting teaching" card is played and SLT are questioning.

 

Ask them how often they swap their cars and if they are leased and why, it's not really any different for computers.

 

Going back to the original security bit, with root kernel hacks at BIOS level and government audits taking place based on their IT recommendations and it starting to be recorded as red marks against the school.

The one that made me laugh the most which we got a yellow for a month ago was WIFI 6 as we are WIFI 5 gen 2 but as I highlighted we don't have any WIFI 6 devices nor was it readily available on the market during our last refresh.

 

Anyways I digress, you can get new machines from Dell at ridiculous specs for £350 a pop with 5 year warranty and their enterprise management for BIOS settings, updates and drivers is superb!

 

In short, schools in general have to start waking up and assigning proper money into IT budgets for both security and compliance or the government will start red crossing them on audits. It is a dangerous world out there on the internet nowadays!

 

I smiled at your "You need to have a frank sit down with your SLT and give it to them straight, they rely on IT for EVERYTHING nowadays."

 

I remember having a conversation at LSFC like that with someone who said "we could still open the doors and teach if all the IT was down".

We then moved into our new campus that had Salto locks on each door and that simply wasn't true - without IT you could barely get in to the campus and certainly not into any offices or classrooms - not without a big crowbar at least. Where I am now, all of our offices are protected with electronic locks as well as security on reception.

 

People really do rely on IT for everything now and clearly the budget for IT equipment, consumables, staff recruitment, retention and training has not kept up with the pace of change into a culture that takes IT for granted in a lot of places. This is true in some businesses as well as edu/govt sector, though I think edu is probably about the worst I've seen because it's easy to underfund you guys and "get away with it". People won't die of being undereducated, after all :-(

[MrEprise]

Run the standard Windows 11 setup (put it somewhere in your network) and it will chunter for quite a while before offering to keep your programs and files.

If it errors with unsupported CPU or TPM, go to regedit.exe and add the bypass hack:

 

- Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup

- Add a new Dword32 key, name it AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU

- Give it the value 1

 

Re-run the Windows 11 setup. This should work unless your machine doesn't even have TPM 1.2, in which case it's junk I'm afraid.

It will buy you about a year of extra life in these machines but they will not perform the next feature update.

 

There are 3 other reg keys that can be added which purport to bypass CPU, TPM & Secure Boot checks. In my experience, only the first 2 of the 3 bypasses work and we have just 1 computer which doesn't support Secure Boot and alas cannot be upgraded to Windows 11, nor can it feature update either!

 

We have loads of PCs (with off-the-shelf Gigabyte motherboards) without TPMs but do support Secure Boot so I've found these can upgrade mostly fine.

[Olliedawg]

Been at my school for 3 years now. Not had a single IT audit. I just try my best to follow best practices & keep an eye on the dfe guidance