Upgrade of PC Clients and Servers on Staff LAN to Windows 2000 (W2K) By Raymond Poon

As the Windows 2000 (W2K) upgrade for staff PCs will commence shortly after the completion of pilot run which is now underway, we would like to share with you the following so that you and your department can plan ahead:

1. Preparation work

   In order to make the upgrade a smooth and speedy one, departments and their staff must be aware of the preparation work involved and their responsibilities (i.e. backup private data, make software media and license keys readily available, verifying whether departmental specific application software or device drivers can run on W2K, upgrade hardware and/or software, etc). We shall furnish departments with those details later.

2. Installation schedule

   The initial upgrade schedule will be provided after meeting with departments. As it is targeted to upgrade around 2000 staff PCs to W2K within 6 months, and yet the scope of work for each PC (especially those non-centrally licensed software installed on its local hard disk) can be quite different from machine to machine, we expect there will be inevitably slip in the upgrade schedule, hence the actual schedule may become rather short-noticed. We hope departments can understand our difficulties and fully cooperate and bear with the Computing Services Centre (CSC) during this critical period.

3. PCs that cannot be upgraded because of hardware or software problems

   These PCs will have to remain on Windows 98 until the problems are resolved. Effort should be made to migrate to W2K as soon as possible as the CSC has planned to cease both its support and further enhancement on Windows 98 probably by the end of June 2002 the latest. If the problem can only be resolved by upgrading or replacing hardware parts, software, or even the whole PC, then departments should set aside the necessary budget and complete the replacement before the support cut-off date.

4. Arrangement for PC that cannot be upgraded during scheduled time

   If some or all PCs cannot be upgraded during the scheduled time, very likely their upgrade will be rescheduled or postponed to the end of the upgrade exercise.

   If departments for some reasons remain in Windows 98 environment beyond CSC’s support cut-off date (tentatively June 30 2002), they may have to rely entirely on themselves for the Windows 98 support after that.

5. To conserve manpower, the CSC will immediately cease its support on Windows 98 Client and Windows NT 4.0 server environment for a department if all its client PCs and Staff LAN servers have successfully migrated to the W2K environment.

6. Both the Windows 98 client and the Windows NT server environment may become irrecoverable 3 days after the upgrade has been successfully completed. So departments and staff should set aside some spare time to test the new environment and to verify that all data files are preserved within 3 days after the upgrade.

7. If departments want both the Staff LAN and Student LAN to have the same W2K environment but have not yet planned so, they should plan for it now.

8. Staff's local hard disk must have at least 1 Gigabyte of free space for the W2K upgrade, plus whatever disk space required by the departmentally provided software and those personal ones to be subsequently installed under W2K.