Your university's windows desktop?

Lanz

Lanz

Lanz

Soldato
Joined
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Romford
I'm curious what version of windows your university's standard desktop (library, labs, staff pcs etc) is using?

For people still using xp, is there any dates for a win7 role-out that you've been informed about?

And lastly, Are they full blown desktop os's with locally installed apps, or are they using VDI /streamed apps?

Thanks
 
Lanz said:
I'm curious what version of windows your university's standard desktop (library, labs, staff pcs etc) is using?

For people still using xp, is there any dates for a win7 role-out that you've been informed about?

And lastly, Are they full blown desktop os's with locally installed apps, or are they using VDI /streamed apps?

Thanks
Click to expand...

At my college they use 32bit XP, its balls, it sucks, and everyone i know uses win7.

The machines suck as well, 2gb ram, and they expect us to model using 3Ds Max on them? lmao :)

However, at my Uni they use Win7 enterprise, with Xeon CPUs and i think some sort of mid end nvidia card :)

Unsure when other places will be updating, but sohuld be pretty soon as XP will no longer be supported, as you know.

As for apps etc, they are installed on a server based system of some sort, but we cannot install or delete anything, as when we log out and back in, it restores it.

If we have new applications, they ghost all of our computers when we are on holidays, and then install new applications and programs then.
 
Some labs are XP x86, and some are Win7 Enterprise x64.

Don't know about the library thin-client machines, I stick to our faculty labs or my MacBook.

Applications are installed on the machines, and they simply ghost the images on. Why they don't use Windows Deployment Services I don't know!

We don't have admin rights or anything, and have a Win7 roaming profile and an XP roaming profile.
 
Westyfield2 said:
Applications are installed on the machines, and they simply ghost the images on. Why they don't use Windows Deployment Services I don't know!
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Ghost (and I'm talking about the solution suite system) can be a lot quicker and easier to create and deploy images than WDS :)
 
xp and vista here. Hopefully we are going to trial win 7 x64 this summer. A problm with WDS is it doesnt deploy every piece of softwre. Where as we have very litle problems rolling out images via a ghost multicast server.
 
Sheffield Hallam run on XP and runs on a network boot image I think with Novell administrating it. Certain labs (e.g. CAD labs) have a different image with different apps and higher spec, but they all work the same.

EDIT: We have a central IT services who cater for the other more specialised apps where needed.
 
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I'm a technician at a sixth form college and we use 32 bit XP with RM CC3

God it's horrible. We are going to CC4 in the summer but christ knows when we are changing to anything other than XP, senior management and others seem terrified of changing, it took us long enough to change to office 2007 that 2010 was already out.

XP along with CC3 means that things just don't work how they should.
 
I'm at Newcastle University.
All computers and laptops run Windows 7 Enterprise. The computers in the labs (i.e. electronics & chemical labs) run windows XP due to the software compatibility.

All of the applications are stored on one of the local servers and can be accessed directly from a University based PC or a computer outside the network.

For most other schools/colleges/universities I'm guessing the need to upgrade to Windows 7 is either unessential and/or too expensive to do so.
 
I work in a uni at the minute. XP is still the standard but for machines with more than 4GB memory they go 7 64bit. Trying to find 64bit XP drivers for use on Novell (I know) iPrint hasn't worked out so well.

Most new laptops and desktops are running 7 now as the latest Novell client seems to work pretty well. We have to update GroupWise to v8 before we get 7 support and to do that we need to upgrade the backbone of the network.
Think work on that will be beginning soon as the students are now done with full time classes.
 
When I was at Queens Belfast at the start of the year everything ran xp for some inexplicable reason, a new 10m quid library running on xp made me cry inside as it just didnt work.

The UU's Belfast campus runs w7 and osx 10.4/10.5 all around its different labs, I was a little excited by it as they did the software upgrade to old hardware! (pretty much unheard of at queens)
 
UWE runs mostly win 7, not come across any vista but one lab still has XP (although we do have MAC and various distributions of Linux).

Machine specs vary across the campus for different labs, High-end labs generally have quad cores with 6-8gb ram and high end graphics cards, also dual-screen 22" monitors.

Low-end labs we're still looking at single cores with 1-2gb max and maybe even onboard graphics.
 
We're using WinXP though it's a bloated mess at the moment with locally installed applications, as well as the Sophos host crippling the updates and network that can't cope with the load. Were supposed to move to Win7 over last summer though couldn't due to problems with old software and experiment hardware.

Lab PCs are mostly Dell Optiplex 740 or 755 minimum 2gb RAM.
 
Do your uni's have a central IT Services Dept that caters for all labs and areas, or does each dept have its own techs who create images and keep their desktops working (hence a bit of XP here, some win7 there, so OSX here etc)
 
From what I've seen we have Windows 7 and XP. Windows 7 is only on the web design computers, most of the others I've come across have been XP unfortunately. I think it really depends on the department/course though really.
 
Lanz said:
Do your uni's have a central IT Services Dept that caters for all labs and areas, or does each dept have its own techs who create images and keep their desktops working (hence a bit of XP here, some win7 there, so OSX here etc)
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We've got a central team that prepares the image with local techs to do the installs as they won't touch experiments due to the expense of replacing some of them.

This was the first year that we ran AD instead of Netware so hopefully our problems were just part of the changeover.
 
A mix of XP/Vista/7 at UEA.

They pretty much all suck. I'm not sure what they do to them, but they're just so....damn....slow. I've never seen a Core2Duo or even Core2Quad boot up and launch apps so slowly. In one of the labs it took 10 minutes to log in and load up Netbeans :-/

It varies by department though, some use XP and have it running very nicely. Luckily I've got CentOS on my lab machine now so I can actually do work. With Vista I'd spend half the day looking at a screen telling me that it was 'Applying Internet Explorer Branding Policy' :(
 
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