I have almost finished deploying seventeen multimedia behemoths into a school. This has been an interesting journey to date and while I am still not quite ready to say that we are finished I have sufficient time to now document the process.

The machines that I am installing are top of the range desktops. They have 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo processors sitting on 1333MHZ FSB motherboards. They all have 2GB of ram, 250GB hard drives and DVD-RW drives. Each machine has a 256MB Geforce video card and is sitting inside a solid aluminium case with a 400w power supply. They have been chosen to go into a wide range of classrooms (years 1-6 and with teachers at different levels in terms of skill development and integration) and they have been chosen with longevity in mind. The machines are also identical – one main reason for that is to make the deployment and future service easier. We want to still be operating these machines in five years time.

I have installed Vista Enterprise (Business) and Office 2007 onto these computers. I applied Vista’s first service pack and the Ministry of Education’s licensed copy of CA Antivirus and PestPatrol. Apart from DVD watching (not a common event on a classroom computer) and CD/DVD writing software I have also installed Hector the Protector, ArtRage (under a special deal which allows NZ schools to get the full version at a really good price) VLC, MS PhotoStory, Paint.NET, PhotoFiltre, Picasa, Google Earth, Google SketchUp, Foxit, Skype and VSO Image Resizer. After that I installed some specialist curriculum software for reading, writing and music.

After installation, I created two profiles – one for teachers and one for students. The difference between the two profiles is that staff (grown-ups) can install software and make changes (with UAC of course) and students can’t. Everyone accesses the internet and network drives by logging onto/into a server. The whole point of these machines is to make it easy. The student profile has two folders on the desktop. One folder holds all the shortcuts to the reading, writing and maths software for which the school holds licences. The Multimedia folder, shold shortcuts to everything associated with the exploration and creation of new material. As each class is set up the teacher can decide what is on the desktop and what remains behind a menu.

This whole task of creating the computer image took me about four hours. At the end of it I created a disk image that (after some initial hassles) I was able to deploy to the rest of the computers in the batch. This meant that when my off-siders assistants and I installed the computers all we needed to boot up, image the disk from my external hard drives and then tweak the local settings (computer name, default printer and sort out the individual teacher/class needs). Physically moving the computers and finding suitable desks and tables took the most energy.

So why Vista? Why not XP? At the moment Windows XP SP2 is the best Windows XP operating system around. It’s solid and it’s reliable. All of the software and hardware that teachers and students want will work and, on a machine with the right specifications, will work well. We’ve moved to Vista because the gear is ready for it and the drivers are available. And everything just works. Also after more than twelve months of testing on both laptops and desktops – and with SP1 now available – the hardware is ready for it. We’ll be operating a dual (XP SP2 and Vista) environment for as long as needs be – based on the hardware. Our setup is designed to minimise issues between the two platforms.

And why not Linux? After all I am operating my own very nice little Linux machine … The reason that I am not advocating Linux for everything at the moment is the same reason that I’m not convinced about Terminal Services. The environment is not conducive to encouraging users to do the things that we want to encourage – at the moment. For sure, Linux variants work out of the box in many cases – but in just as many other examples hardware is not supported or it is difficult to install the software required to do many multimedia tasks. This means that Linux (and terminal clients) often become little more than research and publishing machines. Which is fine a lot of the time. But some of the time teachers want to use curriculum software (that, rightly or wrongly, someone in the school has paid good dollars for) that will only run under Windows XP. And we have users, both teachers and students, who wish to quickly create multimedia presentations. The main stream Windows operating systems are still the best to install the tools for this to happen ubiquitously. Which is not to say that we won’t be running open source operating systems and software soon. It’s just that we’ll subject iot all to good solid real world testing first.

And finally, ubiquitous computing is the goal here. We want the operating system, and its bells and whistles, to be invisible to the end user. We want school users, whether they are a teacher, or a teenager or a brand new five year old, to be able to accomplish their tasks easily. We want the user to decide the tasks rather than the limitations of the tool to dictate. We don’t need to make our learners into guinea pigs.

No related posts.