Looking for a management solution for school lab and laptops.

[Guest]

Hello, I'm hoping someone here can help me out

I work for the Technology Director at the School of Business & Economics at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. One of the things we are responsible for is the maintenance of a lab with 15 machines running XP, as well as around 30 classroom laptops which are stored while not in use, and 15 "loaner" laptops which students check out. To keep these machines somewhat bloat-free we run Deep Freeze, a software designed to allow the machines to be messed around with, but when restarted restores them to normal. This creates a problem however, when we want to update windows or antivirus software. In order to get the updates to stay, we have to turn off deep freeze, restart, update, restart, turn deep freeze back on, and restart again. This is a lengthy process, especially when we have 60 or so machines to do it on whenever there is a new virus running amok

So we are looking for a solution, whether it's using deep freeze or not, to keep these machines secure and clean with minimal effort

Could someone help? I have looked at SMS and SUS a little, but don't really know if they would help us that much, since deep freeze would still block the updates.. is there a better alternative to deep freeze

Thank you.

 

[James Martin]

Andrew,

I'm not familiar with this product in particular, but from looking at their
product description for Deep Freeze Professional it would seem like you can
accomplish what you're talking about but using thaw space, scheduled
maintanance, Active Directory and SUS. Integrating those features with the
windows features could provide you with a completely automated process.

Hello, I'm hoping someone here can help me out.

I work for the Technology Director at the School of Business & Economics

at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. One of the things we are
responsible for is the maintenance of a lab with 15 machines running XP, as
well as around 30 classroom laptops which are stored while not in use, and
15 "loaner" laptops which students check out. To keep these machines
somewhat bloat-free we run Deep Freeze, a software designed to allow the
machines to be messed around with, but when restarted restores them to
normal. This creates a problem however, when we want to update windows or
antivirus software. In order to get the updates to stay, we have to turn
off deep freeze, restart, update, restart, turn deep freeze back on, and
restart again. This is a lengthy process, especially when we have 60 or so
machines to do it on whenever there is a new virus running amok.

So we are looking for a solution, whether it's using deep freeze or not,

to keep these machines secure and clean with minimal effort.

Could someone help? I have looked at SMS and SUS a little, but don't

really know if they would help us that much, since deep freeze would still
block the updates.. is there a better alternative to deep freeze?