Nt1235 Assignment Week 1 Selecting a Windows 7 Edition
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Selecting a Windows 7 Edition
As a computer consultant working with a new client I would 1st want to look at the hardware and the specs of the workstations and server in particular. In this scenario we have 8 workstations, 3 in a Warehouse across town and 5 in the office with the Server running Windows Server 2003. Choosing the proper version of windows upgrading them properly will solve some of the client’s slow connectivity problems without losing any data in the process.
Each workstation has a 1GB of Memory and 1.8GHz Processor, which means that we must choose a 32-bit version of Windows based on the system requirements alone. These workstations do not have enough system memory in order to run the 64- bit version. While there are 6 different versions of Window 7, Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise would be the best choice for my clients in this case.
The 5 Workstations
that are housed at the main office mainly run office programs and don’t take on a lot of the heavy lifting but having a few extra features like AD DS Domain support, offline files, encryption and network based backups can make things easier to organize and keep secure. The utilization of Offline
Files will really take a lot of load off the server by allowing the users to save their work directly on the workstations allowing access to those files when the server is down or to just reduce traffic when it’s being used most. The Encryption features and AD DS Domain support allow users to keep their files secure and organized while still giving the ability to share within the network.
The 3 Workstations residing in the warehouse across town would work best with at least Windows 7 Enterprise. This upgrade is needed for the warehouse comput
ers because of their need t
o have remote access to an offsite server. I would recommend an upgrade to the server to Windows Server 2008 R2 because of the networking features not included with other versions of Windows 7 like Branch Cache. Branch Cache will reduce WAN bandwidth using file sharing and a Cache system
providing a faster reliable access to offsite files, which is crucial because the server is across town.
Now that we have the Windo
ws version nailed down we can now install them on our workstations. The workstations are currently running Windows XP and because of this we must choose to perform a clean Windows 7 install, which will erase each user’s preferences and change all settings to its default. If upgrading from another version of windows 7, one can perform an upgrade which will keep their user settings intact.
Making this client’s network fast
er and more secure will involve upgrading to Windows 7 Professional, and Enterprise as well as Windows Server R2. The added features that come with Windows 7
will allow the network to run faster and be more reliable especially to those that work in the warehouse across town. The only real downside about the upgrade will b
e that each user will need to reconfigure their devices because a clean install is required.
