A Good Time to Upgrade?



  • Good evening.

    As an avid RSS reader it was suggested I post this here.  

    Every day I have users asking me when we will be upgrading to Office 2007.  In general my answer is "sometime after you graduate and I get a new job".   What I do wonder is what the answer is at our public libraries here in NYC.

    When I went to local to see if they had a book only being sold in hardcover at the moment I wanted to look it up.  I couldn't that day due to the system upgrades at the local branch. The following sign was covering all monitors that day.

     NYPL Upgrade Path

     



  • I can understand not upgrading the OS religiously, but (ignoring the fact that it says February) why does it take three days to do the deployment? I'm imagining a couple techs with a stack of Windows XP discs (each with their own CD-key) trying to perform an upgrade installation on each machine individually, running back and forth between machines to press "Next" a dozen times. Or perhaps they've heard of this "disk imaging" thing, and decided to do that - by removing all of the hard drives and, one by one, installing them into the base machine and doing the image. I remember when I was forced to do that to a lab in high school. The next time around I came prepared with a linux floppy and did it over the network.



  • @Lexarius said:

    I can understand not upgrading the OS religiously, but (ignoring the fact that it says February) why does it take three days to do the deployment?

     To give them credit (because I feel sad that our library system is so underfunded) until very recently they were only open 4 days a week (ala Febrauary 2008). I am pretty sure the 3 days they were closed they didn't have staff there either.

     



  • The real WTF is the wording itself. Was "The computers will be down February 25th-27th for upgrading" too simple?



  • @Lexarius said:

    I remember when I was forced to do that to a lab in high school. The next time around I came prepared with a linux floppy and did it over the network.
     

    At least you had a lab where all the hardware was pretty similar. I had to install by hand because EVERY machine of the thirty in the lab needed some different drivers. Also what was mandated by my school then was windows ME. Combine with a domain server based on an old version of suse linux and you can imagine the wtfery.

    And of course the real wtf at that lab: They wanted an account for every student but giving each a generated password was deemed too complicated so they decided to go with last names for initial passwords.



  • @witchdoctor said:

    And of course the real wtf at that lab: They wanted an account for every student but giving each a generated password was deemed too complicated so they decided to go with last names for initial passwords.

     

    This reminds me of a time back at Uni where at the beginning of a particular semester everyone got their account passwords reset to their date of birth.  I logged into my friends account, set him up a rather offensive signature for his email and used my l33t hax0r skills to move the location of the .sig file and make it system/hidden.  The real WTF is that it took the helpdesk a week after he reported it to find out what had been done.

     Happy days :) 



  • @witchdoctor said:

    At least you had a lab where all the hardware was pretty similar. I had to install by hand because EVERY machine of the thirty in the lab needed some different drivers. Also what was mandated by my school then was windows ME. Combine with a domain server based on an old version of suse linux and you can imagine the wtfery.

    Different drivers isn't that big deal at least on Windows XP & 2K as you can use sysprep (and you should be using sysprep if you are using disk images) and include drivers that will be installed automaticly on-demend (see KB314479 & KB254078 for more detailed information). I'm not entirly sure if Windows ME's sysprep supports it.


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