Free software for latops - You'll all want these...
I createed a listing of free software to install on laptops. I installed and tested these packages and they all work well. Included are things like Google Earth and OpenOffice. I've also included packages like ClamWin, a free anti-virus package and SpyBot, a free anti-spyware program. I would suggest installing all of these on your laptops.
In Forest Grove, they will configure one laptop with all MS security updates and all the packages they want to install and then make an image of that laptop hard drive. This image can then be replicated to all the other laptops. This proces is called drive imaging. There are several software packages that will let you do this including Symantec Nortan Ghost, Lan Desk and even a free tool called G4U.
To see the list of software head for the ORVSD Moodle server at: http://courses.orvsd.org/course/view.php?id=48
If you have other packages that you think should be installed, start up a discussion and make suggestions on the site.
The key to join this course/discussion is "collaborate." While you're there please take the time to fill in your contact data in the "Contact Info Wiki."
--Paul
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We purchase our MS licenses from OETC via School Agreement. The School Agreement currently licenses our district for Windows Vista and all prior versions, of which Windows XP Tablet PC Edition is. From MS, I can get a VLK for the Tablet PC edition, but I need our School Agreement number from OETC and they haven't been able to tell me what that is yet. I'll update again if I get any new news.
Russ Fagan
Network Administrator
Redmond School District
Russ - I appreciate your work on this, and your posting info. Thank you very much, and keep up the great work!
We ran into a ton of issues attempting to obtain VLK media and a key for the Tablet PC edition. We had both hardware and software issues and were yanked around equally by MS, Gateway, and our software vendor. The easy answer...Windows Vista. Our School Agreement includes Vista and Vista supports all the Tablet functions. It also fully recognizes the hardware. We are rolling forward with Windows Vista as the OS and will add Office 2003 from our VLK as well. We are working out the details of our teacher and student images and will be rolling after X-Mas break imaging all the laptops.
Russ Fagan
Network Administrator
Redmond School District
It turns out that ESIS (the JInitiator in particular) crashes IE in Vista. This was unacceptable, so we went back to the drawing board. We found a whitepaper that allowed us to modify the MSDN version of XP Tablet PC Edition to create a CD that could use the CD Keys provided by Gateway and would allow sysprep to work correctly. That allowed us to start from scratch and not have to use the recovery CD.
So we imaged our laptops with the following:
- Windows XP tablet PC Edition (all Service Packs and Hotfixes through 1/10/07)
- Office 2003 Professional
- Frontpage 2003
- OneNote 2003
- MS Photostory
- Adobe Reader, Flash & Shockwave
- Tablet PC Education Pack
- Tablet PC Experience Pack
- Inspiration
- Itunes w/ Quicktime
- Audacity
- Power DVD
- Nero Burning ROM
- TrendMicro Anti-Virus
Critical to funtioning on our network was the latest Intel Proset Wireless drivers with the Single Sign-On features installed. With this driver and the 802.1x policies supported through Windows 2003 Active Directory, we are able to support our Foundry wireless infrastructure without any user interaction. Turn it on and logon, the machine uses an administrative profile to connect to the wireless network and waits for it to start before running logon scripts and applying group policy. We're very pleased with the functionality so far.
Russ Fagan
Network Administrator
Redmond School District
Is there a real concern over imaging one laptop and then using that image on many machines? My concern is that somewhere down the road, MS Genuine Validation will fail because the same key was used for many machines. Our existing XP license is a Volume License Key and we have no issues with using that on many machines. It's not the Tablet Edition however and there are some hardware issues with Gateway that prevents even loading our VLK XP Pro version on the provided machines.
If I overcome the hardware issue (disk driver), and can load our VLK XP Pro, how can I add the Tablet extensions to it? I have a Tablet PC Edition CD from OETC that appears to be just the extensions. Does anyone have any insight?
Russ Fagan - Network Administrator
Redmond School District
www.redmond.k12.or.us
[email protected]