Best Practice for Hardware Upgrades

[aroyvt]

Hello,

Does anyone have a best practice on how to handle hardware upgrades in Lansweeper? We are a state college with 900 student computers. We annually upgrade a portion of the computers, giving the new computer the same name as the old one it replaces, and the old computer either gets repurposed (with a new name) or disposed of. After the new computer with the same name gets scanned, it appears to inherit all the history of the old computer in LS. The old computer (if it gets a new name) suddenly has no history at all. Everything in tblCompCustom has to be manually transfered to follow the old machine. To complicate things further, we image and run updates on the new computers with a temporary name before it gets deployed and given its permenant name, so now there's history associated with the temprary name.

All our machines are Dells, and I keep a copy of the Service Tag in the CompCustom table to help keep track. I've gotten good enough at SQL to update info one machine at a time, but I don't know if there's a way to do a batch of machines, or if I should attempt renaming machines in the tblComputers table instead of copying data from one machine to another. It's all becoming a bit of a headache. Is anyone else having these issues? And what's the best way to handle this?

It would be great if LS maintained a unique IdentifyingNumber (the field that holds the Service Tags).

Thanks for any help, pointers, tips, etc!!!
Aaron

[Hemoco]

Lansweeper uses the combination domain name\computer name as a unique computer identifier. So if you retire a computer and give a new computer its name, that new computer will be considered the same machine and the database entry that exists under its name will simply be updated.

If we consider the following scenario...
- Existing computer gets renamed.
- New computer takes on a temporary name.
- New computer eventually takes on the name of the old computer.

... the recommended approach is the following:
- Prior to renaming the first computer on the machine itself, rename it in Lansweeper. In the Lansweeper configuration console under Lansweeper\Scanned Computers, right-click on the machine and choose Rename Computer. When this computer is rescanned, its database entry will simply be updated, as Lansweeper has its new, correct name.
- Allow the new computer to be scanned under its temporary name.
- When you're ready to give the new computer its final name, first rename it in Lansweeper. Rename the machine itself afterwards. It will keep all of the history associated with its temporary name.