On 2/20/2016 12:38 PM, Mayayana wrote:
| And, *I* would want them to get any "required" updates automatically
| without having to deal with seeing *all* of these machines again,
| every Patch Tuesday, etc.

I wonder why you posted your question. You seem
to already have formed opinions and gathered as
much info as you want.

I've not used Windows 10. I was hoping folks had first-hand
experiences with it and could indicate why a student *would*
want to run it instead of W7, etc. And, at the same time,
identify issues that I (with no experience using it)
*or* a student (with little interest in the details) wouldn't
notice.

I would add, though, that I don't enable updates on
any machines I handle. I install service packs. Beyond
that very few updates are important and some will
do damage. Unless you use MS Office, there's not
much to update. If you don't use IE, even better.
MS doesn't generally offer functionality updates. Just
bug and security patches. If you don't use MS
software online then you don't need security patches.
You'd get those from Mozilla or whatever other
company makes the software you use online.

Exactly. The last batch of machines I built were
XP boxes. As ALL the updates were already released,
I could safely install ALL of them and then remove
the update mechanism (nothing new to be gained with it).

But, moving to a more current OS -- especially one that
WANTS to go poking around in your box -- means you have
little practical choice in the matter.

If you're going to enable Windows Update then
you're probably leaving your students to be tricked
into Win10.

I can remove the executables so the updates never happen.
But, that means any hardware that is received as a donation
must have driver support for the older OS's.

This is a losing proposition; over time, the machines that
are available as donations will NOT have support for
older OS's thereby forcing newer OS's to be deployed.

I.e., the machines being manufactured today will be available
as donations in 2-3 years. Look at today's offerings and see how
far back OS support goes.

By the same token, machines seen as donations today were
manufactured 2-3 years ago. The "Windows Option" becomes
increasingly difficult to be presented as a *choice*
("use THIS version of Windows, or nothing")