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Posted
Come to NZ, we still have netbooks with Windows Cretaceous Edition on them but you will pay twice as much for them and they will be last years model.
Guest TheLibrarian
Posted

Beware the netbooks that come with Windows 7 with a downgrade option to WXP - in our case the HP 110-3101sa - the drivers given on the HP site fail miserably and WXP can not be installed on these netbooks.

 

There is a thread on here about those netbooks somewhere so I won't hijack this thread with that rant any further.

Guest TheLibrarian
Posted
Might start forcing the hands of schools to update now then.

 

Where's the button that allows me to add a sarcastic thanks. ;)

Posted
Might start forcing the hands of schools to update now then.

 

It's not so much the updating of the OS that's the problem; it's more the complaints when software written by Noah whilst searching for dry land won't work...

  • Thanks 1
Posted (edited)
It's not so much the updating of the OS that's the problem; it's more the complaints when software written by Noah whilst searching for dry land won't work...

 

It's a case of getting SMT and staff to realise that some junk software that (if it was a pc or a chair) would have been depreciated to nothing is holding everything back and probably costing more money than it would take to replace it. Moving to Vista dropped our support issues by more than half, 7 dropped it even further. Sure we lost a little old software even though most was actually alright with little tweaking, dropped a few stations but TBH in a primary we get good use out of 2GHz Celerons that we just had to upgrade the bios on and chuck in a GB of RAM. This cost about $70nzd a pc at the time and we upgraded anything that took DDR, is just too slow. All in all it does have its benifits and its going to happen some time unless your switching to mac or *nix clients.

Edited by SYNACK
Posted

BTW - anyone saying "good" will get their name put on the list! :)

 

Its not good :(

 

I may have to retire :)

 

I'll need to seriously test out whether Win7 Home (or whatever netbooks come with) will work OK with W2k3 acting as file/print servers (I'm assuming DHCP/DNS will work)

 

And get all my WPKG scripts to work with the new MyDocs/Program Files structure - my 1st attempts didn't work out too well last year as Mr MS didn't translate things like %ALLUSERSPROFILE%/Desktop into the new setup :( and don't get me started on changing from My Documents to Documents :( )

 

Is anyone running Win7 machines in a non-domain school network?

 

Si

  • Thanks 1
Posted (edited)
I'll need to seriously test out whether Win7 Home (or whatever netbooks come with) will work OK with W2k3 acting as file/print servers (I'm assuming DHCP/DNS will work)

 

And get all my WPKG scripts to work with the new MyDocs/Program Files structure - my 1st attempts didn't work out too well last year as Mr MS didn't translate things like %ALLUSERSPROFILE%/Desktop into the new setup :( and don't get me started on changing from My Documents to Documents :( )

 

Yes it will work with a server handeling the file and print even if it is not domained, but if you have 2k3 why not just domain them anyway.

 

You can use %systemdrive%\users\public\desktop etc to refference the paths in the packages.

 

edit, disregard the domain question, I remember now, home client OSs.

Edited by SYNACK
  • Thanks 1
Posted

Have to agree. XP is reliable and tends to just work, but Windows 7 kicks it's arse wrt imaging (images deploy noticably faster than XP, so do software packages IME*), hardware support, and just increased managabililty in a domain environment.

 

Most applications can be made to work with Windows 7 (Application Compatability Toolkit if necessary, or Cameyo if really fubar).

 

*On two freshly imaged machines side-by-side with the same hardware, switch, OU, Group membership and GPOs, one XPSP3 and one Win7Pro, Solidworks will install noticeably faster on the Win7 machine.

Posted
I've almost finished migrating our entire college over to Win 7 and I'm glad to see the end of XP. Yes it was a great OS but it is almost 10 years old and I felt it was time to move on. I too feel that win7 runs better on some of our machines than XP did and certainly runs the big programs (ie autocad and corel) faster.
Posted

The problems with this situation are several - for literally years MS has been trying to kill off XP and has announced its end serveral times - each time its been easy to get around it (twinload/xp downgrade cd/netbooks excempt etc) so I've managed to avoid the issue.

 

Now, if this one turns out to be the actuall death knell, I'm going to have a bit of a problem when my schools do there usual end of finance year and splurge out of IT equip (that I've been asking them all year for!) as I'm not going to be able to purchase kit that I know I can get everything to work with :(

 

I operate my schools in a simple as mode as possible (to reduce my network admin time - I look after 7/week and do a bit of TA IT support/teaching as well) so I have a single user/full admin rights client setup.

 

This saves time and money (don't get me wrong - if I had fully setup domains running smoothly _ i'm sure they'd also take same amount of time to administer :) ) as I don't have to fork out dosh to MS for VLKs and can just utilise the OS (Win98SE when I started - XP Home for last 6 years) that comes with the machine.

 

I work in primaries, I don't have any trainee hackers attacking my networks and therefore I don't need to lock things down.

 

A lot of my software (Textease/blackcat super tools( :( )Tizzy's toybox etc was bought in Win98 days and if I'm lucky has been dragged into working on XP. A lot of it still does a good job at educating pupils and the cost/benefit of "upgrading" is a close decision so either there's going to be a fair bit of work getting them to work on Win7 or theres going to be cost to pay for new software.

 

(I'm lucky that MS have decided to make PhotoStory work on Win7 otherwise we'd be truely stuff!)

 

Now on a personal level, I like a challenge but I've now got to decide whether to ask for loads of dosh/spend a load of time to upgrade to W2k8 and Win7 Proffesional or just spend time (no money) in getting Win7 Home to play nicely on my setups/software.

 

On a personal experience with Win7, I have to say it has worked flawlessly on my 2 daughters laptops for the past 18months and I'm very impressed with its stability - it could be the next WfWg3.11 :)

 

Si

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