PC Configuration Service

It is often cited by suppliers that ‘Windows’ is not a good operating system, or that ‘no PC should be used’, and that solid state devices should be used instead.

Our honest opinion is that you should look at what you want to do with the system and make an informed choice at that stage. However, we chose to develop our solutions*¹ using Windows as an operating system as it gives us and our customers the greatest media compatibility, flexibility, and for more advanced systems than simply playing a media file one after another. Also, Windows is the most widely adopted operating system with it being used in over 89% of computer systems worldwide *2.

However...

The PC you buy ‘off the shelf’ from your local computer supplier is not configured correctly for 24/7 everyday use as a digital signage player or kiosk system:

• Typically it is supplied with many applications which are of no use to you, may interfere with the operation of the kiosk and may in fact cause a security risk as they can provide ‘backdoors’ whereby local or internet users can access the operating system and install messages or viruses.
• Similarly, as the computer has probably been sat on a shelf for a number of months before you purchased it, the drivers used are probably out of date. The device manufacturers may have released newer ones which make the computer more efficient, or possibly prevent it from locking up or crashing (you may not realise, but around 95% of crashing/freezing faults are down to faulty drivers with the remaining 5% being an actual hardware fault).
• Finally, the Windows operating system is designed for doing a wealth of jobs (no we won’t list them all here!) and so it has many ‘hidden’ configuration options which allow it to be configured best for each purpose. In fact, there is even special versions of Windows called ‘Embedded’ versions which allow us to put together only the components we need to use rather than turning bits off from an ‘end user’ full operating system.

So you can understand it makes a great deal of sense if you are doing any form of rollout that the computers you are about to use are setup correctly.

If you prefer to use your own supplier of hardware, we don’t mind.  We supply software after all, but we would recommend that you configure it correctly and use this correctly configured system as a ‘Gold Master’ which you then copy to all the other computers you are using in your rollout. This drastically reduces operational costs, time and money.

If you don’t have the skills in-house (there is an article about it in our knowledge base), we can do this service for you for a small charge. If you wish to upgrade and use our System Watchdog which provides a powerful remote management tool and many other security functions, you can also add this for additional security too.

It will take around 1 week from when you supply the system to us to do it and test it, and we will:

• Build a ‘clean’ version of the Operating System for that PC, including latest working drivers, removal of unnecessary applications and configured to operate as a Digital Sign or Kiosk.
• Install Acquire, latest Codecs, etc (and other applications if required, such as System Watchdog) to a state whereby your engineers just need to install it.
• Pre-configure the PLUS! Activ8 program to run how you want it to (e.g. it can automatically configure itself on the PLUS! Network just by turning it on, or the installation engineer can enter details of where they are installing it).
• Pre-load some ‘Welcome’ content onto the systems which will playback once to the unit has been installed and whilst it is waiting for any updated ‘real’ content.

From this, you can use this to clone to the other computers in your rollout.

*1 Acquire is predominantly a Windows based software application, however for cost reasons alone, we also have a small plugin to our player software that allows a single player PC (running Windows!) to control  a number of cheaper ‘slaved’ solid state devices.

*2 information from Netmarketshare.com and correct as of March 2011