Month: June 2010

This has been a big project for us, starting from scratch to get a Windows 7 image built for our particular uses. At times it has been kind of overwhelming. I wrote before that monolithic is out and componentised is in. However the simple fact is that no single solution will suit all requirements. After…

Today we moved along to our first major deployment project using Windows 7 and MDT. We have several new laptops and have decided that they should be upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7. In practice this means a clean installation of Windows 7 plus applications. Right here it is best to have a look…

This is a subject I have written about various times before. We didn’t get the capability to install printers automatically to client computers via a GUI until Windows Server 2003 R2 was released, which was happening about 2 years after I started working with the school where I am now employed. Along came the Print…

Once you have got started with MDT 2010, you will want to start playing with its more advanced features and functions. I may have mentioned that one of the scenarios for MDT is to deploy a base OS and install its applications automatically, instead of capturing a reference PC. This approach is ultimately the one…

Having completed my reference computer setup I decided to jump in boots and all to the task of getting this computer imaged. Starting at Part 11 of the series at WindowsNetworking.com I began with executing the script LiteTouch.vbs. In practice I have to use RunAs /user:<username> in order to log on to the deployment share…

Almost two years ago I wrote that I was planning to roll out Vista to student desktops. For a variety of reasons that didn’t happen. Some of the reasons were alluded to in that article – there were so many headaches with the new security model for a start. Last year I made a concerted…

This post is a bit of a wrap up of a whole lot of stuff. Firstly our experiments with the HP Thin Client are continuing. I successfully got it to connect to a WS2008 RD server with NLA turned off. I’m now experimenting with student logins and mandatory profiles. One of our standard configurations for…

OK, this is a big subject of discussion for schools. Should your school buy new or second hand PCs, or look at rebuilding existing computers it already has? In NZ there is no direct funding for computer hardware. Schools have to make the most of their tight budgets and the cost of computer purchases adds…

As I noted in my previous post about NComputing thin client terminals, HP and other vendors have been producing the thin client technology for much longer. In NZ, NComputing has been particularly effective at getting its name out there in the education community in a way that we haven’t seen with HP, in part because…

Well, I have carried on with this task since I installed 7 onto my home PC a couple of days ago. So far it has been reasonably straightforward. The following are points of contention/issue that have been encountered: Even if you are the administrator of the computer, you aren’t automatically granted full permissions onto other…