Hi!
We are a small company with 10 locations, 9 are remote to the IT dept. We were blessed by the owners with 100+ new Dell optiplex 3010's at the beginning of this year. I have used those to migrated this company off XP (and that wasnt even the origial reason for the new workstations).
As i deployed new machines, of course i recieved back old machines. Many are not 'bad'... optiplex 780's, 360's and 330's. I have refurbbed the best and deployed them, too. We have what we believe is an opportunity here in the IT dept. to use some of this older hardware to great advantage.
As any company, we get problems (such as cryptolocker) occasionally, and other general Malware. When a Branch location has a PC that is, for whatever reason, Kaput (but OS kaput, not hardware.... hosed OS or user enviroment or even fresh install for a New employee, lets say) we feel like we should be able to come up with a way to keep a base image at that location and *possibly* do some sort of hands off network image install, without having to transmit that image across the internet at slow speed, and without having to pull a branch manager away from his job to help.... or provide them a domain admin password so he can do certian domain functions to the PC for us, ect.
Out of my 'leftovers' what we have is a single optiplex 360 per branch, Vista Business 32 bit, 2GB RAM, add-in TB drive for local backups and storage. This box is being called the "I.T. box." It will be a headless mini server for our use at the branch. Spice works, .pst of the manager's backups, Antivirus Management Console, and a couple other jobs.
So, IF IT WERE POSSIBLE, how could we leverage this peice of hardware? If a branch workstation gets Cryptolocker, what could we use to be able to image it remotely.....and not have them have to send it back to us, image it, and ship it back? ( worst case on that is, 3 business days shipping BOTH ways, plus the work time... )
helpful info: we do not have Volume Licensing from MS, we do not have a KMS or MAK server (could THIS be that??) or anything like it. 2 domain controllers here.
I KNOW you guys will have many suggestions and we cant wait to hear!