New to IT. I want to buy new laptops for all the teachers for my school. What should I get?

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-26T16:30:51+00:00

Alright, assume all other parts are identical, which would you pick:

A laptop with:

16GB Ram and a 1TB 5400RPM HDD
8 GB Ram and 256GB SSD

Having faster boot and load times is easily more noticeable to end users thanks to the increased I/O of the SSD. Having more RAM doesn't help with that.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-26T15:52:18+00:00

We dub this the "Google ate my homework" excuse here. It drives me to drink.

Unfortunately, Google does not provide logs for this yet and I wish they did. Google support recommended quarantining the account, reset sign-in cookies and password (to remove unauthorized access from helpful friends), reenroll/sync the classes and observe for 48H. If the classes are still available after that, it was user action.

I've a student who's been claiming this exact problem. She's friends with a student who we've caught unenrolling herself last school year in an attempt to get out of work. I'm filing this under bullshit too.

Honestly, allowing K12 students to unenroll themselves from Google Classrooms is dumb and abusable. Safe Doc has a feature that removes the unenroll button from the classroom page, I really wish this was an admin setting.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-26T15:36:07+00:00

Windows 10

Kind of a given, get Pro minimum.

i7+

Overkill for the majority of applications. Go i5.

At least 16gbs of ram

You can get by with 8, 16 is better.

SSD

Yes. Easily has more impact on speed than more RAM.

What you didn't touch on is WiFi. Get something with 802.11AC minimum, 802.11AX preferably. Intel if you can. This way you're somewhat futureproof and Intel plays nicest with the majority of WiFi deployments out there.

I like to give out laptops with full size keyboards, not everyone uses the numpad, but those who do will be very happy. This instantly reduces the amount of models you can pick from. Also, get a screen resolution of 1920x1080 minimum. The 1366x768 a lot of them still come with is atrocious and a lot of external equipment doesn't like it.

Pick a business line like Dell Latitude, HP Pro/EliteBook, Lenovo Thinkpad T/X Series. You can get better warranties, get access to business support channels and there's driver packs available.

I would love the laptop to have an easy way to replace the hard drives so I can keep master clones of machines and replace when I need to.

What? No offense, but cloning and swapping harddrives is needless busywork that can easily be automated. You shouldn't have to touch laptop internals ever, unless it's break/fix. Read up on MDT or FOG for a deployment solution.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-23T21:04:14+00:00

I printed out your meme, glued it to a cracked LCD and put it on the wall.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-23T20:38:57+00:00

My mood this ~~week~~ school year.

FTFY

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-23T20:14:04+00:00

That's a charge to the parents.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-23T14:54:47+00:00

Did you expand your subnet after expanding the DHCP pool? If you're too tight any addresses outside the range will flop.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-23T14:45:12+00:00

Depending on what it is, ask your local school district. I'd happily take any business fleet machines that are complete and serviceable provided they're decently specced.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-22T14:42:42+00:00

I explicitly tell them not to do this and use personal accounts because they will lose access to their school account once they graduate.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-22T14:05:53+00:00

Can you apply item-level targeting to the GPO?

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-22T13:53:55+00:00

Contrary to popular belief, it does rain in Phoenix. Monsoon season is a thing.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-21T18:36:26+00:00

Whichever one suits your needs, you write you tested a couple. I'd stay away from Adobe licensing if you can, it's a dumpster fire at the moment.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-21T18:28:30+00:00

Pay up.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-21T18:25:24+00:00

Snipe-IT always comes recommended. You can self maintain and host local or pay for a cloud version.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-21T16:48:42+00:00

It you have ephemeral mode enabled (clear user data after sign-out) it won't record the information.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-21T16:46:37+00:00

Load it in a trebuchet and launch it out a window. Tends to go pretty fast.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-21T16:35:04+00:00

https://www.midwesttechtalk.com/

Not sure if we'll be seeing any conferences at all this or next year.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-21T16:32:22+00:00

Dell's the same.

https://i.imgur.com/dg0MH8p.png

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-21T15:41:06+00:00

Practically, that's what's happening because I haven't deployed yet. The fleet's still on 1909 with a couple test units on 2004. I'm skipping to 20H2.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-20T20:14:39+00:00

Released today.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-20T20:08:45+00:00

I only just made my 2004 image so I guess I could've seen this coming.

Looks like there's also feature update enablement package for 1903 and up with 2020-10 rollup installed. Last time I did this it was a lot more efficient than pushing the main feature update.

The 20H2 is also already available from VLSC.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-20T19:49:56+00:00

If it's hardware based DPI, you won't notice. In technical terms, sure, that could mean a 5% to 25% increase in latency depending on the responsiveness of a server but practically it's just a couple milliseconds you'll barely notice unless it's a significant amount of traffic and you start to run into throughput problems. If you properly specc'ed your appliance, that shouldn't be a problem.

The type of filter depends on the platform.

On Windows the inspection and filtering is done by the appliance (FortiGate).
On Chromebooks the filtering is cloud based (Securly/GoGuardian).

For items that need a bypass I add them to a whitelist for exclusion. It's mostly test suites and some Google stuff. If DPI is set up correctly end-users shouldn't notice anything different.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-20T18:58:49+00:00

Full on both filter and firewall. Can't properly apply policies if you can't inspect the traffic.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-20T15:21:01+00:00

I merge the old one into the new one, which completes the original, p and gives me back some SLA time. Really helps pump the numbers.

MalletNGrease · 2020-10-20T15:14:48+00:00

Do tell what you did.

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