Tester2000

Snap, modules broken here too. Dashboard is also incredibly slow to load.

Yes, there is a security torx screw in the little recess where cables exit the IO shield. Once undone, the shield slides upwards ~10mm before being completely free of the tower. The rear cover of the desktop (the one they can add a decal to) has a clearly visible blue locking mechanism behind the IO shield. Simply slide that sprung lock up/down (I forget which), and give the rear cover a tap from the right. The back cover will slide left and off the tower, completely exposing the internals. You can go from a "ready to use" desktop, to having RAM/storage access within 10 seconds.

Flex Slim with AIO stand and IO shield. Keyboard, Mouse, HDMI and IEC for screen through front access slot. IEC and Ethernet out the side. We used Y splitter IEC power cables. Very easy to work on, especially if you need to access the internals. Far quicker to get inside of than a competitor's product that we have bought plenty of in the past.

Some come with dual USB C charging ports, which is a boon when it comes to broken charge ports since both students and staff alike love to rag them in/out of the charging trolleys. Refer to this list for any Chromebooks you find/get quoted for: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en Some will not have long left to live. I'd also not recommend touchscreens in secondary schools, with them being harder to swap out a simple panel, as well as being dearer. You'll also find touch screen ones are typically heavier, which matters quite a bit when staff or especially students offer to carry 5+ to/from a trolley. We do however only install touchscreen ones in our primaries, as a much larger number of students than you'd think have never typed on a physical keyboard or used a trackpad before that point. We find the touch panels help them ease into using Chromebooks. Malicious damage in primaries is also far less common than in secondary's, just make sure they've got good drainage channels! In terms of other general advice, you want the keys as hard to pick off as possible. That's the biggest annoyance we have here, not really hinges or screens, but students ripping the key caps, supports and buttons off the keyboards. They are mostly repairable with a bottle of superglue and a number of sacrificial Chromebooks.

We've noticed the exact same issue in our trust. It's been a thing for a few months at this point. For us it occurs when uploading more than one file at a time from the local machine, of any file type. Selecting multiple files from GDrive works fine however. Our temporary recommendation to users is to import files from GDrive instead. We typically find users are trying to upload files from their GDrive using Drive for Desktop instead of simply selecting the upload from GDrive option in the first place. The prior has the single file issue, the latter doesn't.

Academy Trust Approximately the following over 15 sites, a mix of secondary and primary: 7,300 Students, 1000 Staff, 6300 Chromebooks, 1000 Student desktops, 800 Staff laptops/desktops (laptops are what most teachers use, desktops are mainly used for office staff), 6 AD Domains. Our roles include, but aren't limited to: managing site AV (inc hall performance lighting), phones, printers, Wi-Fi, networking, servers, CCTV, Paxton door systems, all device repairs in house (especially Chromebooks), setup and maintain the syncs from our MIS to 3rd parties, all IT acquisition, catering systems, assisting with the ever increasing number of FOI requests coming in nowadays. Run by 8 IT staff, 2 apprentices.

As an additional point of note, even with everything setup correctly, you can run into an issue where at say 10:00 you may not be able to get any clients signed in with their keycodes, with that exact error message, however if you keep trying eventually the keycode will be accepted. It's sporadic and hugely stressful when you've got multiple suites of students ready to go yet the keycodes work on some but not others. Good luck!

The Room Booking System from School Cloud has been very useful in our trust. We've had it in one form or another now for probably close to 7 years. It can integrate with some MIS systems if you like (not all are supported however) to provide an easy to read overview of room bookings and can be used for resource bookings too. Simply in the staff time saving of maintaining a resource spreadsheet, it pays for itself in our secondary schools.

We keep getting this too at our sites. Sophos didn't mark any tests in the last few weeks as ransomware, however marked a dozen or so of our active clients as ransomware today across multiple schools. We've also suffered with the random clients crashing/closing and partially crashing file explorer at the same time. This ends up requiring the client to be restarted again, sometimes also requiring a computer restart to successfully launch, as it will check for updates but progress no further. We also had the update problem, where the new updated version had been installed on our clients, the client shows the new version number as installed, but when you launch it, the program gets stuck in a "you must restart to apply updates" loop on random machines. The fix for that so far has been to uninstall the client again and reinstall again, sometimes requiring this 2 or 3 times before it will launch successfully. We've never had such issues with it in prior years. It has caused exams and ourselves plenty of headaches this time around.

Bit late to the post, so I do apologise, however for anyone else's reference, from experience of the Lenovo V series laptops (V110, V130, V155, and V15's) the build quality leaves something to be desired regarding the hinges. They may last for a consumer or a light business user, but for a teacher who's moving the laptop between rooms a couple of times a day, the hinges break at an alarming rate. Usually starts with the hinge nuts being ripped clean off the top case, or the top/bottom case snapping around the tiny hinge plates. We've had a few hundred devices of the aforementioned models, and a large percentage of these have all ended up the same way, used for parts as the hinge mounts/case plastic near the hinges have snapped.

We changed the registry settings on ours however it seems the DFE have something in place to automatically change the default username and password back to their settings, breaking the auto login for .\localuser, and reverting back to this mess. They aren't too slow when running very few programs/tabs at once.

That's a 8 year old i3 to boot! They are fairly quick at getting into the OS, however being a 2 core/2 thread CPU it is worked hard for basic tasks. The ones we have received so far have been issued by the DFE through our local council under a slightly separate scheme to the one outlined by Government I believe. I could however see them using the same supplier/product for the second scheme. The supplier for these ones has been Computacenter. This is very interesting! We were initially offered the option of Chromebooks and/or Windows PC's however were later informed that Chromebooks weren't available and we'd only be supplied Windows machines, which while we're grateful for having devices provided, it does cause our particular schools a lot more headaches than Chromebooks would have. At least they aren't cheaping out on the Chromebooks opting for the 4GB RAM models over 2GB ones.

We've logged a ticket via phone with them this morning for this exact same item, either Windows admin credentials and/or BIOS admin passwords, with them stating a 24 hour turn around time frame. It seems bizarre that these details were not shared with the schools via the email address IT/senior leadership at schools have used to register for devices.

Hello there, We've got a similar setup at our school, and also use Apple Configurator to image the iPads. Their software doesn't support "over the air" imaging, and as such can only be used by directly connecting the iPads with cables. To get the applications into folders you need to compose one iPad exactly how you want it, then back that device up and push it down to the other devices. Before pushing it down to all of them at once, perform a test run on one or two devices, to ensure all your settings have been pushed down as you wanted. Any new application installed on the devices will assign itself a place on an app page until you create a new updated backup with them in the desired locations. It's a bit of a pain, especially when the staff using the devices don't put them back after use, leaving you with the option of re-imaging some of them now or waiting till another time to hopefully catch the trolley when they've all been put back. For the above reason we are also looking at an "over the air" solution for managing the iPads, however the solutions don't look cheap. We're looking into the Casper suite at the moment as it appears to offer some nice control features for teachers too. Hope this helps, Tester.

The timeout on our office devices is in excess of 12 hours, although I'm not sure of the exact figure at present. A sign out sheet would be a nice idea, especially as we can then track the individual device's user history, however getting the staff/students to adopt and stick to it would be a mini nightmare in itself, and as sods law seems ever present with such things, it'll be that one class that don't bother to sign out the machines, that have the problems. I'll have a look into a system like the above, however my hopes are with Microsoft adding a timed auto logout on the application, as even in a home environment these features would be nice to have. Thank you for your time and suggestions, it is most appreciated.