Installation of Windows 10 in enterprise

Hello all,

I was talking to our IT personnel at work about upgrading our Windows 7 PC’s to Windows 10. We are doing a gradual upgrade of the PC’s in the workplace. He was saying that it was going to take 1 hour per PC to upgrade. He was worried that we will have to do this everytime we upgrade to a new version of Windows. The question is wasn’t there something for enterprises about once Windows 10 is installed there is a way to install Windows 10 in the background and let users still remain logged in and then all it would require is a reset or am I imagining that?

Thanks in advance for the advice,

Todd

Conversation 6 comments

  • wright_is

    Premium Member
    01 April, 2019 - 9:35 am

    <p>Not quite. The main part of the installation, going from Windows 10 to Windows 10 is done in the background, followed by a reboot. It does as much as possible in the background, but the reboot will still take some time (on my PCs, under 10 minutes, on some older PCs at work it can take longer. If they taken more than 10 – 15 minutes it is probably an indicator that you need to upgrade them or replace them – E.g. if they don't have an SSD it will take an age).</p><p>I have set up an extra WSUS group for doing the version upgrades. We then put specific machines or ranges of machine into that group and announce it. We are careful to ensure that not all PCs in a single department are updated at the same time! That way someone in the department can still work, whilst the other PCs are upgrading – we then do the rest of the department a week later.</p>

    • rtodd_us

      Premium Member
      01 April, 2019 - 9:41 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#417350">In reply to wright_is:</a></em></blockquote><p>Thanks for the quick reply. That makes sense. Wish it wasn't any downtime, but 10-15 minutes isn't bad for Windows 10 to Windows 10.</p>

  • Patrick3D

    01 April, 2019 - 12:09 pm

    <p>Where I work we don't use any system management and just let each system update as Microsoft designed Win10 to do. Only a single system in our entire company needs each update to be installed manually due to a driver compatibility issue, the rest update on their own and cause an hour of lost productivity for the end user twice a year. The only thing we do is make certain that local downloads are enabled for the updates so that we don't have a few hundred systems trying to download a gig+ off the Internet at the same time, and configure<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> each user's Desktop/Documents/Pictures folders to be synced with OneDrive so that system restores or replacements are trivial to do</span>. </p><p><br></p><p>We get a heads up from our network admin when the updates start to roll out as he sees the first few seeds download and then start to spread out through the company network in his network monitoring reports. If anyone calls for help we just tell them to reboot and call us back if a problem persists.</p><p><br></p><p>From the user perspective, they get a pop-up to alert them of an update needing a restart to finish which they can postpone or choose to restart on the spot. Eventually they get used to it.</p><p><br></p><p>When we first upgraded from Windows 7 to 10 we simply emailed users instructions for starting the upgrade process and then played wack-a-mole with the few systems that failed to upgrade by going around with the ISO on a USB stick. There were less than a dozen systems requiring manual upgrades.</p>

  • minke

    01 April, 2019 - 8:22 pm

    <p>Maybe things have improved, but when a company I worked for went all in on Windows 10 we quickly learned that updates could take 45 minutes or more to install. It wouldn't happen in the background, and there were frequent failures and problems. Our IT department encouraged us to update as soon as possible, but let us postpone so we could do it on our schedule. Inevitably, there would be someone who let the update role and would find themselves without a functioning PC when they needed it. I must admit, I have been off Windows 10 for awhile, partly because of these bad update experiences both at work and at home.</p>

  • Tony Barrett

    02 April, 2019 - 6:21 am

    <p>In place Win10 upgrades are hit-n-miss anyway – I certainly wouldn't do them in the Enterprise. We're doing fresh installs of 2016 LTSB/2019 LTSC only. To fully prepare a Win10 laptop OOTB with all the company software, tested and ready for deplyment takes around 1/2 day, and while we've automated the initial install, there's still some post-build manual work required. It's pretty much the same as Win7 in most respects.</p>

    • wright_is

      Premium Member
      02 April, 2019 - 7:11 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#417540">In reply to ghostrider:</a></em></blockquote><p>We use an image, with the standard software build on it. 20 minutes and the new PC or laptop is fully configured with all of the standard software, it just needs to be added into the domain and the latest updates installed. We can usually roll out a new PC in about 2 hours, including documentation and setting up the user's account (network printers, first run on Outlook etc.).</p><p>Using WSUS, we control the roll-out of upgrades to the latest Windows 10 release, so it is done in a controlled manner.</p>

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