On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 2:48 PM, paul chinnery<[email protected]> wrote: > We''ve got about 275 desktops to work on for Win7. Mixture of W2K and XP. > Obviously, we need to get rid of the W2k first but there's no way we can > budget to upgrade all 275 machines at once.
What I'm planning on doing is having every computer ready to go for Win 7 when the time comes. That means recent hardware and all the licenses. Then all we have to do is go around to each desk and start the re-imaging process. To enable that, we've been buying new PCs with Vista licenses, but then downgrading to XP before deployment. So quite a few of our PCs already have the licenses and hardware needed. We're just holding back deployment of Vista/Win7 until more stations are ready. Hence my sharp interest in downgrade rights. While I'm still planning on staggering the upgrades, that's just to avoid a help desk overload. I'm sure there are people who won't be able to find the "Start" button... er, orb... no matter how much advance training they get. Since I am half the IT department (I've got a greenhorn for easy stuff), that's important, too. But even so, I think we should be able to get all the computers re-imaged in less than a calendar month. We'll have to do lots of testing in advance, of course. But it's close to an all-at-once upgrade. Since we make extensive use of roaming profiles, that's important, given that Vista breaks profile compatibility. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
