jsnetman

The ICT teacher here managed the RM network before I was employed so yes it can be done. That would be something to discuss with senior management outlining the pro's and con's. Pro's being you get a less expensive network con's you need someone with decent skills to run it which will be more expensive. But on a large network you subtract the the persons wages from the contract with RM you get lots of money left over.

It just so happens I regard people who spout the benefits of a managed network the same way when the person may have highly developed technical skills. I guess we are at odds here, I'm perfectly entitled to my opinion. In no way am I decrying technicians, I know from experience that all tech jobs are not equal, meaning you get roped into other duties not directly connected to IT. Therefore you don't get or it takes longer to do more technical duties on a network. I am also advocating RM for these types of school, IN MY OPINION it's the best out there, but very expensive.

To get any type of functionality on a network and perhaps group policy control/joining a domain you are going to need Win 7 Professional/Business. ask the supplier to upgarde them to professional or else buy some upgrade licenses. I don't think you can downgrade from Win 7 Home to XP professional.

RM is the best solution for schools that do not have technical staff of what I would say have high technical knowledge of OS's and server technology, in this scenario RM achieves it's goal of a ready setup and easy to manage, don't get me wrong you still need tech knowledge to run an RM network but on the other hand any teacher or technician with a low skill set can run (providing they have a support contract). I'm sure many good network managers have RM but personally I don't see the point. I inherited an RM network in 2000 it may have been connect 2.4 I think or maybe earlier, I hated the fact that we had to rely on floppy disks to do rebuilds as in my mind PXE and server deployment was the way to go, and of courrse licensing costs. Although you are not required to buy RM hardware (over priced and under specced in my opinion) they did put pressure on you to do so. If you feel you have enough skill to implement a vanilla network that would be my recommendation, most of the tools to manage the network are built in, perhaps not in a more convenient way than RM but they are there. One thing I would say about RM's hardware is that it is the very best quality so I suppose you are paying for that when purchasing their kit.

There was a niffty script on here a couple of weeks ago called Inventory.vbs, covers a lot of the hardware spec of all machines when deployed as a startup script. Search for it in edugeek. Got it running here works like a dream.

I initially thought it was a laptop, forgot the desire was a phone. Apologies.

If it's windows 7 try running powercfg -energy in a cmd window it should interrogate the battery and give you all the information. Ah sorry desire is a phone.

Buy the licences outright and try and keep them for 6 years, thats what we do here, had xp for roughly 7 years and now we are on Win 7 should be at least 4-6 years. We use a Schools Agreement Plus. Office might need ugrading more often they seem to be coming on very fast now. But you could always go Open Office for that. We tried here but staff snubbed it.

When I was PAT testing in a large college the rules were new equipment need not be PAT tested and PC's which do not move around very often could be done every four years, these rules might have tightened since then so check the PAT testing guidance. Its only things like kettles and soldering irons that need doing every 3/6 months or things that are moved and handled every day.

This problem used to come and go when we had XP, never got to the bottom of it. Extreme cases we had to rebuild, not much help I know. We also gave the local admin username and password to staff but not students, but not really recommended.

I have seen a few post on here which say they roll out images without using sysprep /generalize, if you do do this WSUS will not work as all the machines have the same SID.

The only problem being you have to pay for SCCM and I don't think it comes cheap. If you are a school and have less than say 1000 pc's you only need WDS/WAIK and if you want you could use MDT2010 but is not essential which are all free.

We use WSUS

I would start with the fundamentals. Setup a WDS server, get it working with DHCP and pxe boot for your clients, import your capture and boot images from Windows 7 source disk. Once that is done download and install WAIK, can't remember if it includes Windows SIM but am sure it does. After you have mastered those you could graduate onto MDT2010 if you feel a need to.

Using WAIK/WDS here one image for all machines/laptops, software delivered via group policy, MDT2010 looks good but I was daunted with it at first, MDT is more geared to deployment large scale with many different client configurations than say a school with a few hundred PC's. But saying that MDT would be useful to use as it supplies you with a new skill set.

Ok agonygeek

All the best on your new arrangement and I do feel for you as I have a baby daughter and would hate to be apart, but up here in whippet land we have a saying "Don't air your dirty washing in public" Yes I can understand you need someone to talk to and close family is not always the best for that but surely this is not the right place.

Touchy subject this managed/RM network stuff is, but really i am a big fan of RM in the right place and for the right reason.

Can we have a poll, managed or vanilla or maybe RM, Ranger, CSe.... and vanilla

I'm kind of glad this is happening, but the future might be far worse, who knows we just have to wait.

I think you also have to add an entry into DNS, look on google for wpad and DNS. Did this years ago so can't remember of my head. persevere with your efforts as it really does make life much easier, especially concerning laptops off site.

RM is a very good product in the right situation i.e the school does not have a NM or staff with sufficient experience to trouble shoot network problems. If a school does have an experienced NM/Senior Tech they are throwing money away with RM. If you are a school with a high priced and experienced NM and have RM what exactly is the NM doing, the NM is certainly not using there skills to the highest of their ability as RM are doing it all for them.

No problems at all just put your machine in an ou that does not have any policies applied to it. Default computer OU in vanilla should not have any but I'm not sure on RM.

There are plenty of ways to do this depending on your setup, could you tell us what you have i.e. server 2003/08, XP/Vista/Windows 7, active directory?

I guess you don't want vanilla then