Guys,
Im involved in a none-profit organisation for young people and we've just acquired a number of laptops and a projector for them to use by a local council grant. The laptops are Lenovo 3000 N100's with XP Home pre-installed. Apart from this, i'm trying to keep everything open source or freeware - the organisation has to fund almost everything itself, so anything but small licensing costs are out of the question.
So far I've got quite a few open source or freeware apps ready to go such as OpenOffice, GIMP etc, and I'm using Clarkconnect as a server machine, mainly as an internet proxy. I plan on using a combination of the WINNER and PING projects (http://winner.windowsdream.com/index.html) tools for partition backup, and a RIS alternative.
I'm trying to lock down the laptops to make them a low maintenance as possible, ie as few rebuilds as possible, and create a mechanism on the network to restore disk images. Ive locked down machines locally before, used AD, RIS, LANDesk extensively, but I'm after some advice.
Locking down the machines locally, even on 4 laptops is likely to be a nightmare, even if I do one, create a partition image, and restore it to the other three laptops via PING or WINNER tools as mentioned above.
Can anyone throw me some ideas, from a Windows perspective, perhaps some of you have done this before for a similar organisation? I'm used to medium to large organisations with (almost) never ending purchase orders, so this is likely to be quite a challenge!
Thanks in advance.
Im involved in a none-profit organisation for young people and we've just acquired a number of laptops and a projector for them to use by a local council grant. The laptops are Lenovo 3000 N100's with XP Home pre-installed. Apart from this, i'm trying to keep everything open source or freeware - the organisation has to fund almost everything itself, so anything but small licensing costs are out of the question.
So far I've got quite a few open source or freeware apps ready to go such as OpenOffice, GIMP etc, and I'm using Clarkconnect as a server machine, mainly as an internet proxy. I plan on using a combination of the WINNER and PING projects (http://winner.windowsdream.com/index.html) tools for partition backup, and a RIS alternative.
I'm trying to lock down the laptops to make them a low maintenance as possible, ie as few rebuilds as possible, and create a mechanism on the network to restore disk images. Ive locked down machines locally before, used AD, RIS, LANDesk extensively, but I'm after some advice.
Locking down the machines locally, even on 4 laptops is likely to be a nightmare, even if I do one, create a partition image, and restore it to the other three laptops via PING or WINNER tools as mentioned above.
Can anyone throw me some ideas, from a Windows perspective, perhaps some of you have done this before for a similar organisation? I'm used to medium to large organisations with (almost) never ending purchase orders, so this is likely to be quite a challenge!
Thanks in advance.
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