If you are going to deploy windows 7 using imaging software you need corporate versions, so if you have more than 25 machines simply starting a new corp license for just the software assurance will make life so much easier. You also get all the downgrade rights you want as well as the upgrade to enterprise. The cost for the corp licenses is of the order of £3-4 per desktop per month in the UK and that can be spread. The other way to use images to deploy is to build 50 images for 50 desktops and store them somewhere keeping track of which license key is where.
Currently you can add Software Assurance to PC's bought in the last 180 days but it's usually 90 days. Mike -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 02 July 2009 8:33 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Win 7 license gotchas: Limits on upgrade from Vista, downgrade to XP 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/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
