Windows 8 custom imagining for multiple clients -help please?

Question

If anyone can help us I would be very grateful!

Every week we have multiple pc's to distribute to new clients. The machines have to be heavily customised with quite a few specifics:

• Removal of most extra "spam" apps - Dell, Asus, Acer add icons we don't want.
• Change desktop background
• Add 2 specific user accounts, one of which is named according to machine name.
• Set 2 specific passwords on the new accounts - site specific
• Set Custom icons for each login
• The machines are never setup for a domain, so Active Directory technologies can't be easily applied.

The volume and budget is such that the machines are not usually business class devices and we are not setup for any of the technologies used by much larger IT companies like group policy driven MSI updates etc.

Our current process is Donkey powered. On windows 7, deploying a new machine, fully installed with our software will take up to an hour if SQL Server is put on it or 55 mins if not. This is a totally manual endeavour that I'm itching to reform. As the machine make/model changes month on month, I can't rely on what will be installed.

I've looked at Ghost, but it won't work as each machine has it's own specific license key-rather than volumne license.

This process has been bugging me for a long time but it's not been my own department to sort out; however, having worked in schools where I could deploy software packages en masse, I can't believe my colleagues when they say this is the only way to do this job.

Can anyone help? We've done the google dance quite a lot with Windows 7 to solve this and now with Windows 8 but nothing quite fits what we do.

If this is NOT the place for this question, apologies-I did look for a Stack site thats more OS specific but didn't see one! :).

Thanks for any advice offered!

Answer 1

This is not an easy task. I can only give you a high level overview.

Look for the Microsoft tool SYSPREP - with it you can reset a machine you have previously installed with all the software and drivers you require to a state where it boots running a "mini-setup" including driver discovery. Example:

Sysprep /oobe /generalize /shutdown

The programs remain installed. Shutdown the PC after sysprep ran and take an image using Ghost or any other imaging tool of your choice.

Note:

• All essential hardware drivers such as chipset, harddisk, cpu etc. for the target hardware need to be registered using PNPUTIL before you are using SYSPREP, otherwise the prepared and applied image boots into a bluescreen on the target PC. Registering more drivers than you need does not harm as Windows detects the hardware and only installs the drivers it needs. Simply put all driver packages in C:\drivers, then run the following command in a command window to register them for plug and play (note that using -a -i installs them, but here you need just -a, which advertises them). It will run recursively through all directories where *.inf files are contained:

  for /f "tokens=*" %i in ('dir /b /s "C:\drivers\*.inf"') do pnputil -a %i

  Hint: If you put this command in a batch file, you need to use %%i instead of %i.

• You have to activate windows after the "mini-setup" ran if the firmware does not contain a windows key installed by the vendor. Regarding Windows activation, I found at least some information, however not in too much detail here.

This is how hardware vendors are preparing their PCs.

You can find a lot of information about it at Microsofts TechNet sites, check this out: Deliver and deploy Windows 8

I hope this helps.