Laptop & OS to Manage Elk RP and Upstart

S

SteveInNorCal

Active Member
Our security system is an Elk M1 Gold. For the past couple years, I've used my work Dell Latitude laptop to run Elk RP and Upstart to manage the Elk and UPB lighting systems. I'm changing jobs in a couple weeks and need to turn in my work laptop, so I need to figure out the best way to manage the system on my own home computer. At home, I use a mid-2014 Macbook Pro Retina.
 
What's your advice on the best approach?
  1. Install Boot Camp on my Mac; install Windows 10; upgrade firmware on the Elk XEP to 2.0.34 using my work machine before turning it in. I hear great things about Windows running on Boot Camp, but I have to confess I'm really worried about hosing my Mac (or degrading its performance) with Windows. 
  2. Buy an inexpensive PC laptop with Windows 7 installed and dedicate it to running RP and Upstart -- nothing more. I've found refurbished 15 inch laptops with Win 7 for $200 and up.
  3. Buy an inexpensive PC laptop with Windows 10 installed. Upgrade the XEP to the newest firmware before turning in the work computer.
  4. Get a refurbed Mac Mini and a cheap monitor; run Base Camp; install Win 10. I don't care for this because I'd have to store the monitor somewhere in the house.
How well do RP and Upstart run on Win10? Am I better off keeping a Win 7 machine around for a while? Things have worked really well on Win 7 so far.
 
Lastly, should I get 32 bit Win 7 or 64 bit? I haven't seen a clear answer to this re RP and Upstart.
 
What do you think? What's the best solution? Other ideas I didn't list? 
 
For me... it would be #2 or #3. I run W7 x64 and have no issues with RP. I don't have UPB so I can't comment about Upstart.
 
I have a friend who recently upgraded his laptop to W10 x64 and has no issues with RP. He did obviously have to upgrade to the latest XEP firmware, which he didn't do until after he had W10 installed. Apparently Elk provided their own .exe tool to update the XEP firmware if you only have a W10 computer available.
 
#1) If you don't need to run Upstart all the time ( I'm not familier with it ) run VirtualBox with the Windows version of your choice.
 
If the VM isn't running it's not using any resources other than disk.
 
#4) you can run the Mini headless and use Screen Sharing / VNC to attach to a virtual monitor from your laptop. You may find it necessary to score a 'headless' dongle depending on the graphics requirements.
 
I run RP in a VirtualBox setup. As much as possible, I try to avoid having to reboot or switch computers to run Windows software. Can't say anything about Upstart.
 
Thanks, all. I'm leaning toward a close-out W7 machine at Fry's I found last night for $300: Lenovo T420, Intel Ci5-2520M, 14" Refurbished Laptop With 4GB Memory, 250GB Hard Drive, Windows 7 Pro.
 
I just checked CraigsList and found the same machine a couple miles from me for $200. Not sure whether I want to buy somebody's used machine with the registry probably a bloated mess.
 
Not to mention possibly full of spyware and/or viruses. I would never connect such a machine to my network without formatting the hard drive and installing the OS from scratch, which would probably mean buying a new copy since he probably has some OEM version and never had the discs.
 
Depending on the build, many machines built in the past 5-7 years come with a OEM recovery partition to restore the computer back to the factory default state.
 
Though, if it's not been under your control all those years, I'm not sure I'd trust that either, unless there's some strong mechanism to validate that it's not been modified. That would be a pretty obvious target for hackers. Update an offline OS image that isn't under protection because it's just data on disc, not a live installation, then do something to whack the system so that the user decides to just re-image it.
 
Sure, that's possible, but I'd say pretty unlikely. As with anything else, it comes down to what level of risk you are willing to accept.
 
The issue I've found with doing a completely fresh install of Windows from disk is finding all the right drivers for the laptop. I've had Dell's, whose support page lists all possible drivers for that model... and tried to install all drivers listed for a particular piece of hardware and had none of them work. That gets pretty frustrating!
 
Dean Roddey said:
Not to mention possibly full of spyware and/or viruses. I would never connect such a machine to my network without formatting the hard drive and installing the OS from scratch, which would probably mean buying a new copy since he probably has some OEM version and never had the discs.
Click to expand...
 
Excellent point about viruses and spyware. That clinches it for me...get a new, cheap W7 close-out machine. Have to agree also about the additional problem of a clean install of W7 and getting all the right drivers. W7 isn't even sold today, is it?
 
elvisimprsntr said:
W7 64-bit guest on VirtualBox Mac OSX host. ElkRP is the only thing I use it for.
Click to expand...
Why VirtualBox and not Base Camp or Parallels?
Parallels is, of course, $70 while Base Camp and VirtualBox are free.
Any other reasons besides price?
I've got a MBP with 500 GB SSD; 241 GB are available. How big of a partition do you dedicate to VB?
 
Thanks, everybody. I bought a Dell Inspiron 15 inch laptop yesterday at Fry's on sale for $279. I created a new account, set up the IP address, and downloaded everything from the system to the fresh database. It took a number of hours to get it all done (being methodical, careful, and learning as I went), but it all went well and I'm using the new machine to control the Elk M1G. Starting with a fresh database even fixed the problem of always getting an error about inconsistent Rules and Texts between the db and system.
 
I didn't want to connect the new computer to the internet, but I did so to get the Elk RP2 and UPB Upstart software. I really don't like IE or Edge, so downloaded Chrome and (wouldn't you know it) accidentally accepted some crapware onto my machine that delivers endless ads. So I had to install Malwarebytes do some scans and block some domains. Amazing...I own the machine for a few minutes and it starts getting loaded with pure crap from scuzzy people. I should have downloaded the files onto my Mac and brought them over via thumbdrive so I could keep the new machine off the net. Oh well.
 
Thanks again.
 
Steve
 
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