Windows 10 - who's upgrading?

[Yvette Ireton]

Hi everyone

We are considering upgrading to Windows 10 but to be honest we can't see any real advantages over Windows 7.  

Who has upgraded already or is planning to upgrade over summer? 

What are the REAL benefits which justify the amount of time and effort required to roll out a school-wide upgrade?

Thanks

Yvette

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Network Manager
Golden Bay High School
12 Waitapu Road, Takaka 7110
Ph:  03 525 9914
http://www.gbh.school.nz

[Bevan McNaughton]

We have rolled it out to a few classrooms as a test so far.

Benefits:
Shared Updates/downloads. A PC which has updated can share the updates to others rather than independent intenet downloads (if you're not using WSUS).

Performance: A fresh install seems slightly faster starting and sometimes in general use.

Better range of driver support (for most devices).

Beats Windows 8/8.1 hands down.

Self repair much better.

Caveats:
Extra steps required to sysprep an image for deployment.

Applets: The default ones like "Get Office" and "Mail" are annoying - they can be removed I think but haven't tried yet.

PDF files open in MS Edge by default from memory rather than Adobe Reader.

Photo Viewer is too simple and lacks a lot of options.

May require some stuffing around with registry/GPO's to set default applications.

First user logins do the whole "Hi, please wait while we set up," etc.

Upgrading from 7/8 to 10 breaks some features in Office 2013, you have to run 'scf /scannow' in the CLI to fix.

Some drivers don't install automatically - i.e. HP USB printer drivers.

Regards,
Bevan

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Bevan McNaughton

Intranet Manager

MCP, MTCNA, CAP, Google Ed.

Southland Girls' High School

328 Tweed Street

Invercargill 9812

Phone: +64 3 211 6030

Fax:     +64 3 216 9010

Mobile: 027 223 2144

[Patrick Dunford]

We don't sysprep our images so I will be interested to see if MS is starting to force everyone to sysprep for deployment.




There seems to be a lot of scaremongering about the user interface changes from Windows 7 which makes no real sense to me as it is far easier to use than 8.

[Alistair Baird]

[First user logins do the whole "Hi, please wait while we set up," etc.]

This can be removed, well certainly can with WDS/Litetouch on windows 8, so imagine it can with Win10. 

Have heard mixed experiences that WDS works or doesn't work with Win10, would have thought it should work by now. I'm holding off win10 upgrade as I'm still just getting rid of all XP machines over Xmas then we'll all be Win8 (not 8.1).

User experience is the biggie, especially if they're coming from win7, but the new Start menu in 10 is way better than the forced Metro start screen in Win8, you will have to play around with policies to get the right option. Now that my users are all "trained" in win8, don't really want them to go back to the old start button!

Just make sure any old apps will still work. We have a couple of draconian ones that don't.

We don't use USB printers (except the 3D one), all are Ricoh, so no problem there.

PDF and photo viewer are a pain, we install the old Photo viewer from Windows Essentials as part of the image rollout, but it doesn't use that by default on a PC you've no profile on.

We have an app (can't remember what it is, AutoCaAD or Robotics I think) that needs dotNet3.5 which doesn't install by default, just needs tweaking in your deployment.

Alistair Baird

IT Manager

St Peters College 

p 06 354 4198

m 021 990 259

e bai...@stpeterspn.school.nz

[Matthew Strickland]

Hi Yvette

Already well deployed into Windows 10 (156 endpoints so far). More coming as seniors leave (due to video content saved locally on some machines)

Upgraded to Windows 10 to complement Office 2016 - so most machines were changed over in the T3/T4 break.

Also I still use roaming profiles I didn't want V2 (windows 7) V4 (Windows 8.1) and V5 (Windows 10) profiles on the network, so everything is Windows 7 or Windows 10.

I am running Windows 10 on older Core2 systems and it runs very well, even on 2-3GB RAM.

Deployment via SCCM. I run a script to remove Windows 10 apps (bing weather,travel,finance,health,news, office click-to-run, zune music etc)

I have already configured deployment for 8470p, 840G1/G2 and 850G1 Tela laptops, a few have been upgraded along with SSD drives.

Only thing is I use the fingerprint scanner driver from the windows catalog, so I can use native Windows hello and not the clunky HP bloatware.

Not really any real benefits except some newer hardware we have operates poorly in Windows 7, and Windows 10 usability is superior to Windows 8.1

Plus I personally like to run a fresh image on a PC every few years. It cleans out failed updates, keeps plug-ins up to date and seems to reduce helpdesk calls.

Matt

[Patrick Dunford]

After a few months of using Win10 the user experiences for Home and Pro users will be quite different. Most of us will use the Pro editions in the environments we work in, however we will see home editions running on friends' or family members' PCs and have to give advice.

MS has gone to a remarkable amount of effort to bully / force users of older editions to install the free 10 upgrade, this included disguising it as a Windows update, downloading the files automatically onto the computer without asking and even ticking the box in the updates list so an unsuspecting user might install it without being aware they were doing so. It was claimed these were normal practices for upgrading software. They have backed down somewhat since the outcry over these practices, for example people found the automatic download of gigabytes of data blew their data caps.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-upgrade-nags-become-more-aggressive-offer-no-opt-out/
http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-installer-could-be-on-your-pc-whether-you-want-it-or-not/

Anyone who has used any edition for any length of time will have had the experience of leaving their computer for a few minutes and coming back to find it has forced closed all applications (losing any unsaved data in the process) and is restarting to install updates. A work colleague turned his computer on last Monday to get a screen saying Windows was upgrading to a new edition (effectively a service pack). No one asked him if he wanted the inconvenience of being unable to use his computer for several hours while this thing installed. After two hours of waiting with a considerable amount of that time being stuck on 89% completed with no visible progress we turned the computer off, when we turned it back on the upgrade was rolled back to the previous edition.

Home users cannot turn this behaviour off at all unless they are prepared to fork out $300 for Pro. Pro, Ent and Edu users can stop it with a group policy either at the local or server level. We can get back the relative bliss of being able to choose when to download and when to install and whether we want to defer upgrades to a new edition. However I have not yet found a way of stopping the bullying modal dialog boxes that still pop up demanding I stop what I am doing right this instant and install updates. I am experimenting with a WSUS server to see if I can dictate when the updates are served to the computers so as to remove this thing which will stop you from using the computer until you acknowledge it. Imagine doing a presentation and it pops up in the middle of it.

The license agreement has all sorts of nonsense in it including you agree if you live in the US you are forbidden from taking class action lawsuits against MS, and MS can remove any OS feature at any time with an update. Windows 10 now includes advertisements built into every corner of the OS that you can't turn off.

My advice to everyone is think twice about upgrading to 10. If you are buying a new computer with Windows 10, fork out a few extra $ for the Pro edition. However, on x86 hardware, you have other options than MS to consider.

I imagine I will be expected to support 10 on our school computers for years to come so I am trying to spend as much time as I can evaluating it on my work PCs in order to be able to get the best deployment options for our users.

[Yvette Ireton]

We have rolled out Windows 10 to about 70 computers so far now - initially there was major issues with roaming profiles and Windows 10 - it doesn't work, there is a known bug with start, search, taskbar etc and lagging logins - we had to turn Roaming Profiles off and just use redirected folders.  No major issues now. Thanks, Yvette

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Bevan McNaughton

Intranet Manager

MCP, MTCNA, CAP, Google Ed.

Southland Girls' High School

328 Tweed Street

Invercargill 9812

Phone: +64 3 211 6030

Fax:     +64 3 216 9010

Mobile: 027 223 2144

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Alistair Baird

IT Manager

St Peters College 

p 06 354 4198

m 021 990 259

e bai...@stpeterspn.school.nz

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