Monday and Tuesday this week were big days – I was updating our ‘old’ (3 years) Toshiba cows (computers on wheels – they were on trolleys so we could move them from classroom to classroom) to windows 10. The process has gone remarkably smoothly due to the lovely list of instructions I got from my IT admin – just boot the laptops from a flashdrive and away they have gone. The update to windows 10 (from windows 7) has taken between 30-40 minutes per device, and then an additional time for adding on Office, printer drivers etc.
We decided to update these machines first (the HP streams we have are running windows 8.1) as they were still running on windows 7 and had gotten very slow and tired. Connecting via a user profile via the server was taking in excess of 5 minutes – not good downtime at the start of a lesson. With the update, the cows are ready to go in about 30 seconds after powering up – a lovely change.
The change will allow the device to be much more used in class time and for it to be a much more user friendly (for both staff and students) experience. Like with the HP streams, we have set up a generic user, so when students initially start up the device they don’t have to log in as such. This shaves time of them being able to get to the task at hand. There is still a ‘map drive’ system so they can access the shared files on the server, but as we progress with sharepoint, more and more of this will be cloud based.
So the install has gone well, hopefully I can report back in a week or 2 to say that we haven’t missed anything out and they are running well
ibpossum takes on tech 