Will you be using Vista at your school?

[dhassen]

I want to get a feel for how other schools are doing things regarding Vista. I'm sure there have been other threads like this in the past, but I've got a slightly different slant, seeing as Windows 7 is on the horizon....

 

Are you using Vista? Will you be using it (ever?), considering Windows 7 is coming?

 

We're a Secondary school with a Technology specialism, and we used to be at the 'cutting edge' of technology and we want to be again...

[CyberNerd]

We're a Secondary school with a Technology specialism, and we used to be at the 'cutting edge' of technology and we want to be again...

 

You don't need microsoft to be at the cutting edge

[jmcdermott]

No chance.

I have tried it myself and find it to just be a large box of pain in the a**e, and when running on slightly older equitpment such as AMD 2000xp with 512mg of ram it is so painfully slow it is nearly unseable.

 

Think we will stick to xp here for as long as possible. XP is the OS MS got right it seems, it is stable easily adaptable and compatible with nearly everything.

[contink]

It was on the cards for year 3 (almost through year 1) of the 3 year plan but not now...

 

Primaries needn't bother tbh.

[dgsmith]

We moved to RM CC4 and found problems with some of our music software on an XP machine (something to do with the RM components), yet it works fine on Vista.

 

Vista also seems to run quicker for us than XP, which is an unexpected advantage. We haven't yet done a larger rollout beyond our Music machines, but likely will "convert" further machines in the coming months, but certainly not a fully-blown en-masse XP to Vista changeover. Fortunately we have exceptionally specced hardware which is more than capable of running Vista, so as far as that is concerned, we are in a position to.

[CyberNerd]

We moved to RM CC4 and found problems with some of our music software on an XP machine (something to do with the RM components), yet it works fine on Vista.

 

I'm sure RM will be happy to take you money for this essential upgrade

[Dos_Box]

TBH, Vista brings nothing to the party for users that XP does not already have (apart from needing more and beefier hardware). There are a couple of nice little features, but nothing to justify the costs of an upgrade. I know that Microsoft are deliberately downplaying the features that 7 is to include, but hopefully they will have a lot more useful 'fun' apps such as a Garage Band type app. To use an old phrase, Vista is 'Fur coat and no knickers'.

[MattCrick]

We will be Vista by ~2010 we think.

[torledo]

We will be Vista by ~2010 we think.

 

Why not hold off until windows 7, which should be arriving at roughly that point of time.....

 

I personally wouldn't deploy Vista, Windows 7 is the logical upgrade path for 2000/XP users....that's if your not happy to persist with XP well beyond windows 7 arrival. Becoming familiar with Vista is not a bad thing as it'll prepare admins for deploying and managing Windows 7, but other than that it's been a total flop in terms of take up and deployment in business AND education.

[MattCrick]

Why not hold off until windows 7, which should be arriving at roughly that point of time.....

 

I personally wouldn't deploy Vista, Windows 7 is the logical upgrade path for 2000/XP users....that's if your not happy to persist with XP well beyond windows 7 arrival. Becoming familiar with Vista is not a bad thing as it'll prepare admins for deploying and managing Windows 7, but other than that it's been a total flop in terms of take up and deployment in business AND education.

 

Probably because RM will have only just got round to ironing out the bugs in Vista by then, let alone look at Win 7 lol

[webman]

Not in the immediate future. We will hopefully be upgrading to RM CC4 next year but using XP clients.

[sparkeh]

we used to be at the 'cutting edge' of technology and we want to be again...

 

Personally I wouldn't choose the OS as being part of your 'cutting edge' technology. I would use a stable and established OS as a base for using cutting edge tools. Cutting edge usually brings a bunch of problems for you, which is manageable if you are having problems with an app but if the OS is giving grief then that can wipe out your entire operation.

 

XP is staying firmly on my network until there is a persuasive reason to move. I don't feel we are at that point yet.

[K.C.Leblanc]

I don't think we'll be making a move to Vista untill there is a need to be supporting machine with 4gb RAM. XP does everything we need.

[Oops_my_bad]

We have started rolling it out as and when. You get the latest version anyway with M$ schools agreement - might as well get your monies worth.

 

When Windows 7 comes out we will start rolling that out too. Having gone through server 2008/vista migration - most stuff will be in place ready as I believe GPOs etc will be pretty much the same.

 

Not had any problems with Vista so far, seems to run faster on most of the older machines than XP did:confused:

[mikeymike]

no plan for it here either not for a long time at least.

but what about vista as a home user though guys do you still have xp or have you made the switch and if so was it worth it??

[Pete10141748]

Server 2008 and around 40% Vista machines (laptops and PCs) here, no problems at all so far. The Vista laptops take about 10 seconds more to log in than the XP ones, but other than that, smooth sailing.

 

 

As for at home, I have 2x XP laptops, 1x XP eeePC, and 1x Vista Home edition PC - the PC is by far the best to use, Vista is quick, smooth and simple for everyday tasks, and "feels" much better than using boring old XP, which looks tired and dated.

 

*prepares for stones to be cast my way*

[Ex-MGSTech]

I don't think we'll be making a move to Vista untill there is a need to be supporting machine with 4gb RAM. XP does everything we need.

 

And then only on the 64bit version!

 

Also what about having to have a local authentication server for Volume Licence versions as it re-activated every 90 odd days???

 

Steve

 

Home: 1 x Vista one Home Premium 1 x Vista Ultimate, 1 x XP Pro SP3 PC and 2 x XP Pro Laptops....

Edited November 6, 2008 by Ex-MGSTech

[torledo]

We have started rolling it out as and when. You get the latest version anyway with M$ schools agreement - might as well get your monies worth.

 

When Windows 7 comes out we will start rolling that out too. Having gone through server 2008/vista migration - most stuff will be in place ready as I believe GPOs etc will be pretty much the same.

 

Not had any problems with Vista so far, seems to run faster on most of the older machines than XP did:confused:

 

you do get your moneys worth with xp downgrade.

[gshaw]

Vista runs fine... on an E8400 with 4GB RAM, Geforce 8800GT graphics and the x64 version

 

Anything else doesn't run as well as XP does on the same hardware each time I've tested so on that front Vista brings nothing forward. Imaging is a bit better but then if your hardware is fairly standard it shouldn't be much of a prob anyway. Only reason I was thinking about sending it to 2 rooms was that they're due for hardware refresh this summer and we need something Office 2007 \ Vista for students coming in with new machines but think in the end just Office will do the trick...

 

Windows 7 will basically be Vista R2 but MS know they need to change the branding as Vista's name is the PC equivalent of Gary Glitter right now

[AngryTechnician]

2/3 of our 350+ workstations are already running Vista. We've had a few issues, especially before SP1, but nothing game-breaking. Our biggest problem has been with crappy HP drivers that claim they are Vista compatible when they aren't.

 

The pros: Offline Files for staff laptops has proved much more reliable on Vista than XP. Little things like Mobility Center has also made things a lot simpler for staff connecting up projectors to their laptops. Being able to natively redirect more Shell Folders to the network has helped cut down our profile sizes and improved logon times. We've also implemented 802.1x on our wired network (primarily for dynamic VLAN assignment) and the supplicant is more reliable in Vista compared to XP, even with SP3.

 

Also what about having to have a local authentication server for Volume Licence versions as it re-activated every 90 odd days???

 

Happy to report this is a complete non-issue. We run our KMS server on one of our DCs. It uses negligible system resources and has worked flawlessly from day one.

[moiebus]

Deployed Vista school wide over the summer. (barring 5 machines with 'odd' software installed) Only real problems have related to program security for students. I agree that the end users do not 'see' many of the changes in Vista, but having taken the plunge the 'little' changes they do get seem to be appreciated. GP under vista much nicer to use too, plus remote server admin toolkit is very nice to use.

[dhoward_westexetc]

We're evaluating Vista, but deployment won't be quick with 800+ workstations. Main problem is we have some software that won't work on Vista very well, so we would need to replace as part of the deployment costing.

 

Since as many have said, Windows 7 is in effect Vista R2, it is probably quite OK to do all testing on Vista, then implement on Windows 7 (obviously after testing after release that 7 didn't bring its own niggles).

 

After a tricky start, I have few issues with Vista now. It handles group policy miles better than XP ever did, and networking is vastly improved. Performance on newer (2006 >) hardware with at least 1GB of RAM is not spectacular, but is acceptable.

[Zimmer]

Summer just gone we rolled out Vista to all 1200+ workstations across the campus. The only XP machines left are in the HR and Finance departments (due to software compatibility issues), but I think VMware Player may be sorting that out some time soon!

 

Also, just upgraded the DC's and Exchange clusters to 2008.

 

To be honest we was expecting a lot of problems but all has gone very well indeed - A few teething troubles with WDS at first but its all sorted out now

 

We did find that most of our MSI's had to be repackaged, which was an absolute pain in the bum as I copped for most of them

[Tunster]

First post.... woop woop!

 

We rolled out 2 summers ago to all student workstations and teacher laptops (which were bought in mind for the Vista upgrade). Apart from one class-room with minimum spec and had a few teething problems, it's all very smooth. We took the brave decision to move over after I had cracked the new licensing/deployment methods. As we run a lot of corporate software (Office, Adobe CS3, Solidworks etc), we had no problems with software.

 

We did find some of out shuttle machines would refuse to boot over PXE. However, a custom boot-up CD cured that problem.

 

We've officially installed and configured our first Windows 2008 server... oh no, not another challenge... .

[Zimmer]

New to the forum to - Nice to meet you

 

I'm sure you will have few problems with 2008, as we are finding here.

 

One thing that is holding us back (and has really annoyed me to be honest) is upgrading our print servers from 2003 to 2008. One was due for being retired over half term and we have ended up replacing it with another 2003 R2 box.

 

I had loads of problems with drivers for HP printers and Xerox copiers, plus the PAS (Print Accounting Software) and Pcounter ports didn't like the 2008 OS!

 

So until Pcounter and the driver vendors sort things out we will be stuck with 2003 print servers for a while