Re: [school-discuss] Converting 600 old laptops into K12LTSP thin clients for 1:1 ratio at a middle school

[lee <sregdoreel@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Dan,

How many seats are you aiming for? Do you need to resurrect all 600 laptops? If they are 5-6 years old you might be lucky to get 450 of them working. However if If the machines don't need to travel home, then your computer cart idea will also work w/ similar vintage desktop machines that can be had for a modest cost....

Something to consider is that laptops degrade much faster than desktop machines & the wear&tear/duty-cycle on student laptops is 2x that of teachers (who are also hard on gear). The hardware problems in older laptops only multiply as these machines age. 

If I were in your shoes I'd take a look at the cost overhead of trying to revive and maintain a fleet of older laptops vs. dropping in a fleet of 5-6 year-old desktops. Burn-tested Dell GX-1's can be had for $65 (w/ 550 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM, 10 GB HDD), Dell GX-100's can be had for $95. Generally speaking, many laptop makes are harder to open & maintain than the
 best enterprise desktop boxes. 

There'll be a cost of sorting thru this large pile of laptops, diagnosing what's wrong, whether to cannibalize, the resulting buckets of parts to test & salvage & the eventual technical headaches & repair issues of continuing to maintain a degrading fleet of laptops, etc. Dell Optiplex series (GX-1, etc), OTOH, are very easy to get into, repair, etc - much easier than a laptop, and so fleet degradation & cannibalization is much easier to handle. W/ the GX-1's we could match salvaged working HDDs to salvaged CPUs & have working machines in less than 10 minutes b/c the machines were identical otherwise....

 As for the choice of having machines independent of K12LTSP that can travel home w/ students - if the machines are fairly homogenous then rapid cloning can be an option, royalty free, using Linux utilities. I've cloned large batches of systems (Windows & Linux) via network using the Linux System Rescue
 disk.

/lee

Daniel Howard <dhhoward@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>  Folk,
>
> I've know of a school that has over 600 older laptops (either Win98 or
> Win2k) for a 1:1 grant-funded study in 2000 that now only has 50
> functional units, assumedly due to viruses, upgrading OS w/o adding more
> memory, lack of support, etc.  We want to consider converting these into
> K12LTSP thin clients using our laptop cart idea, but I wanted to make
> sure we were considering all options.
>
> We could probably load Linux OS directly onto each laptop and keep them
> as stand-alone units so the kids could take them home as the original
> model proposed, but the support issue (number of PCs to support) along
> with the need to plug them in to power daily in the classrooms and
> either plug network in or log on wirelessly makes that less
>  desirable.
> I'd rather see the kids stay after school for a few hours to do homework
> on them when necessary and reduce the number of PCs to support by a
> factor of 50 by turning them all into thin clients that stay at the school.
>
> Are there any other ideas out there for what to do to revive 600 drunken
> laptops?
>
> Regards,
> Daniel



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/lee
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