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WIndows XP Retirement Nightmares

radgoos

radgoos

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 2, 2012
Messages
140
After nearly two years of pushing, executive finally approved budget (waiting till last minute naturally) to replace all our remaining XP boxes. About 400 in total need to be replaced by the start of April in about 38 different locations. I've been tasked with clearing room for storage and setup for mass imaging so these can get deployed, but it will still take about two weeks to get the computer order in.

FML....

What's your XP replacement nightmare?
 
400 across a lot of locations? Xen Desktop is your pal at that amount, did anyone pitch vdi to them?
 
Replacing XP?

No plans of doing such a thing where I work. :p Heck I doubt our machines would even handle 7. They upgraded Office to whatever the newest version is and it's bloody slow as hell.

Would be nice to have higher end machines with more than 4GB of ram though, and 7 64 bit, but that battle was lost a long time ago.
 
Not sure where you are buying from, but the last large order we placed at Dell we were able to send them our image and have it put on at factory. It's been about 4 years since we did a 200 PC order though.
 
Eiolon said:
Not sure where you are buying from, but the last large order we placed at Dell we were able to send them our image and have it put on at factory. It's been about 4 years since we did a 200 PC order though.
Click to expand...

Really? Cool. Did you just send them the .wim or what?
 
the 400 machines that need replacing right now are P4-class (S775) with 1-2GB RAM. We are moving to i7-4000 series with 8GB RAM. All IBM/Lenovo.
 
radgoos said:
After nearly two years of pushing, executive finally approved budget (waiting till last minute naturally) to replace all our remaining XP boxes. About 400 in total need to be replaced by the start of April in about 38 different locations. I've been tasked with clearing room for storage and setup for mass imaging so these can get deployed, but it will still take about two weeks to get the computer order in.

FML....

What's your XP replacement nightmare?
Click to expand...

I think there's gonna be a lot of this going on. Especially after hacks come out when the OS is EOL.

I have 5 machines left to do in the main office and around 40 in other offices around the country. Not really a nightmare for me but gonna be busy for a while.
 
we've used clonezilla server to do 25 before, hopefully it scales well...
 
I don't have a nightmare really. I been slowly working XP out of my clinic since I started two years ago. I'm down to two boxes. And being the lazy admin I am I'm going to wait til the last minute to replace those two..
That will leave me with all 7/8 machines and one POS vista box that im not replacing til it dies.
 
Lenovo will do the image install for you as well, for a fee I believe. Contact your sales rep and ask. See if a small increase in the project budget can be done since it will save you a lot of time on imaging.
 
At my workplace about half of our PCs are still running Win XP and there is no plans to upgrade. They're even a Win 98 machine still although it's not networked and is just for looking up records in a specific database that lost mainstream support long ago.
 
I have a suspicion that if a critical hack does come out after EOL Microsoft will issue a patch. They won't be working on issuing regular updates though. They still occasionally release patches for IE6 even though its been unsupported for quite a while now. There's still way too many XP machines out there. Watch any news program on TV, local or network and you'll still see windows xp machines running in the background.
 
Mister Natural said:
I have a suspicion that if a critical hack does come out after EOL Microsoft will issue a patch. They won't be working on issuing regular updates though. They still occasionally release patches for IE6 even though its been unsupported for quite a while now. There's still way too many XP machines out there. Watch any news program on TV, local or network and you'll still see windows xp machines running in the background.
Click to expand...

... and if they issue patches for severe issues it will stay that way. Microsoft has catered to the people who refuse to switch for far too long. The companies who can't function without Xp because they never bothered to budget and plan for the long scheduled EOL can go ahead and go under if they can't figure out how to get on to 7 once the major exploits start pouring out.
 
parawing742 said:
At my workplace about half of our PCs are still running Win XP and there is no plans to upgrade. They're even a Win 98 machine still although it's not networked and is just for looking up records in a specific database that lost mainstream support long ago.
Click to expand...

Same here. We're working on getting all machines to 7. I am trying to work out which ones are due for a hardware upgrade anyway and let those hang out for a little while, but move the more recent ones that won't get upgraded for more than 6 months onto 7 (or 8.1, depending on the user/role). I have found a couple Windows 98 machines, not on the network but doing crucial things. They were pretty hidden and no one really touches them, so they didn't get noticed. I'm trying to find upgrades for them, but with old parallel or serial stuff attached and old hardware, it's hard to find drivers and such....
 
You can easily find PCIe LPT and COM cards, USB-adapters aren't very reliable in my experience...
//Danne
 
I started on 7, refused to do XP when we moved to our new offices.

Also going from p4's to i7 seems overkill for people..? Save some money and do i5's with 16G of memory and SSD's ?
 
400?!?! Childsplay!

I have ~3,500 machines across 12 different countries which are being upgraded from XP x32 to W7 x64.

Over the past year we have replaced every single laptop and desktop on the planet with a W7 capable model which we reimaged with XP (lol). Now we're remotely deploying W7 back onto the PCs.

The real headache was dealing with the drive encryption on the laptops remotely so that I could push the W7 image down.

The MS Deployment Toolkit is pretty handy.

Oh and bro, you are too late ;)
5q3D1H7.jpg
 
In the same boat as most in this thread and have approximately 150-200 workstations that need to be upgraded from XP to Win7. The challenge isn't the willingness to do the upgrade rather limited budget for new PC's and Win7 licensing costs. I can only do 20-30 PC's each fiscal if I am lucky.
 
WinSomeLoseNone said:
400?!?! Childsplay!

I have ~3,500 machines across 12 different countries which are being upgraded from XP x32 to W7 x64.

Over the past year we have replaced every single laptop and desktop on the planet with a W7 capable model which we reimaged with XP (lol). Now we're remotely deploying W7 back onto the PCs.

The real headache was dealing with the drive encryption on the laptops remotely so that I could push the W7 image down.

The MS Deployment Toolkit is pretty handy.

Oh and bro, you are too late ;)
5q3D1H7.jpg
Click to expand...
How does MDT work with a standard thin image? I've done some testing, but only fat images.
 
Innocence said:
How does MDT work with a standard thin image? I've done some testing, but only fat images.
Click to expand...

All my work with MDT has been using thick images loaded up with all the corporate bloatware.

I would imagine the process for deploying a standard thin image would not present any challenges.

Biggest issue is transfer time for the thick image to a remote location. We skirt this issue by using a file server located at the remote location.
 
till now we've been replacing them as they fail, most die due to blown caps.
 
radgoos said:
till now we've been replacing them as they fail, most die due to blown caps.
Click to expand...

I've found that nearly every single machine I've upgraded has had swollen or blown caps. Old Pentium D series. A few were causing stability issues, but some ran just fine...
 
Only 400 machines.. heh. About 4 years ago, I was the lead for a project where we replaced at least that many computers at a single site.

We had a large room set up where we would grab the data from the old computers over the network and configure the new machines. The whole project was slated to take a week. We finished a day early. And that was with stuff not going exactly as planned.

Setting up 15-20 machines all at the same time is something to behold.
 
Where I work we are going from XP to Win7 and it consists of about 2500 machines in about 10 different locations in a 8 month time frame. Lucky me I am not on that project :D. But I am on domain migration which is those 2500+ more and is slated to be done this year.
 
Never had an issue, the last company I worked for which did any big IT stuff, we just had base install images built for each type of workstation, and when you ran the install over the network u just chose which network driver and the rest was done for you. XP was easy, eventually they did it for Win 7 too, only thing that sucked was starting the process was a lot of typing.
 
Only have 20 to do for my office. I have a WDS image set up and just PXE boot the Dell 755's and install it. Our only issue is dealing with upgrading from Acrobat 6...
 
We have about 1,500 XP machines. My team is directly responsible for only about 150. It could be worse. One was in our NOC though... lolz

Oh... I should add one fun complication. We have ~70,000 workstations. Only about 10,000 are standardized. End-users have root on the rest of them. Yea. That.
 
ChRoNo16 said:
Never had an issue, the last company I worked for which did any big IT stuff, we just had base install images built for each type of workstation, and when you ran the install over the network u just chose which network driver and the rest was done for you. XP was easy, eventually they did it for Win 7 too, only thing that sucked was starting the process was a lot of typing.
Click to expand...

PXE deploy, F12, F12 , select boot image, select install image - done with an answer file.
 
Yesterday we recieved 200 of about 400 computers that we need to deploy, let the fun begin!
 
Count of XP Machines to get rid of as of today :> 574

This is one Im not sure how to get rid of at no cost to us...LINKY
 
Last edited:
dbwillis said:
Count of XP Machines to get rid of as of today :> 594

This is one Im not sure how to get rid of at no cost to us...LINKY
Click to expand...
Pop an Intel SSD in it, set heavy restrictions on that machine on the network, and call it a day. :D

We're deploying all-in-one 23" 1920x1080 IPS zero clients everywhere. VDIs are located at a major DC in the US and in Asia.

Also, don't get a China-based DC.
 
Yeh, I dont know if I can open the machine, its sitting in an all weather cement 'Hut' under a satellite 70+ft sat dish. Torus
I dont think the guys will let me power it off, LOL
 
Dogs said:
... and if they issue patches for severe issues it will stay that way. Microsoft has catered to the people who refuse to switch for far too long. The companies who can't function without Xp because they never bothered to budget and plan for the long scheduled EOL can go ahead and go under if they can't figure out how to get on to 7 once the major exploits start pouring out.
Click to expand...

The US military laughs at you.
 
JayteeBates said:
The US military laughs at you.
Click to expand...

Considering the number of seats to be upgraded, The Navy/Marine Corps (NMCI) isn't doing a bad job. We're talking about over 250,000 upgrades in 6 months, which equates to nearly 1400 upgrades per day.

The vast majority of f-ups are due to users who cannot comprehend plan language emails telling them to leave it powered up and connected to the network.
 
dbwillis said:
Yeh, I dont know if I can open the machine, its sitting in an all weather cement 'Hut' under a satellite 70+ft sat dish. Torus
I dont think the guys will let me power it off, LOL
Click to expand...

Your not getting rid of that Agilent without spending $$$. Good thing its not a PNA every time I see one in the rack its like there is another high end Lexus or BMW.
 
We're currently in the process. Nearly all machines are Win7 ready, some 16,000. It's going, not super smooth, but it's going.
 
dbwillis said:
Yeh, I dont know if I can open the machine, its sitting in an all weather cement 'Hut' under a satellite 70+ft sat dish. Torus
I dont think the guys will let me power it off, LOL
Click to expand...

I would have thought something like that would be be Windows XP Embedded at best
 
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