Why do we reimage PCs every year?
There are a number of reasons why we create a new image every year to reimage student PCs and redeploy software:
• It optimises the performance of the Windows software by:
ensuring only the software that is needed is installed on the PCs and removing any unnecessary files, registry entries etc.
– defragmenting the hard disk. As the PC operates over time, disks become fragmented as data and code is written and rewritten to different parts of the disk. This means that software performance slows as it takes longer to access code scattered over the disk
– ensuring that the PCs have sufficient free disk space by removing cached and temporary files.
• It is the quickest way to get all the software requested into the right rooms, reducing the risk that software will not be available for the start of teaching. Given the number of changes involved as to what software is located in which room it much quicker to simply start the installation from scratch rather than spending time removing software and then installing new software.
• It minimises the risk of software not working as expected. We start from a standard blank windows installation on to which we add the software. If we didn’t do this then there would be a risk that the software was not removed properly which can cause clashes and problems.
• We get the best performance and reliability from existing hardware, and support new hardware by updating the hardware drivers used by PCs. Updated drivers provide new functionality and resolve known issues with older versions of drivers.
• We minimise the impact of some of the essential updates by doing them as a reimage rather than a series of individual updates throughout the year. So, for example, as part of the reimaging, the Default User’s profile is updated in one go, rather than running a series of updates which would need to be done during the login process and would slow login times while they are applied.