Creating a OEM CD.

~J~

~J~

~J~

Soldato
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This is something new for me!!

Company I work for are about to launch a new project and we've got about 500 PC's that are to be shipped out with a customised version of Vista and our software pre built on.

It's taking about 4-5 hours to both install Vista, all it's updates, our software and drivers and branding (desktop background, etc).

Im sure there must be a way (but have no idea how!) to create a DVD that has all this software pre-built on and just run it from a clean machine thus reducing the set-up time immensly.

Any ideas how I can do this?
 
You could try using something like Norton Ghost to copy an image of a built PC, then all you need to do is copy the image across to each PC. That's what we did at the hospital I worked at.

I don't know the details of it all, but I guess someone else could give you some detailed instructions.
 
Yep. Norton Ghost or you could create an unattended disc and slipstream SP1 and updates and just burn off a load of copies and set them going on each PC.

See Here

BUT with any copy of OS, you'll need to manually add the serial for each machine afterwards. In XP, when you come to activate you can change the serial. May be the same with Vista but i'm not sure. Obviously grab the serial from the side of the case of each machine.
 
Ghost would work as long as the computers were exactly the same every time, otherwise you want to try and make some slipstreamed version of nista (vlite i assume) but i've never tried doing this with vista myself only XP (which is fairly straight forward) so YMMV.
 
Cheers for the help folks.

Yeah it's all the same hardware (eeebox) so looks like Ghost good by a good option to go for.

Like what was mentioned, the only manual thing we'd need to do is just enter the activation key but that can be done when the machines are installed on site.

Thanks again, appreciate the help.
 
Why not use a PXE server such as Microsoft's RIS? If you're doing 500 machines it'd be worthwhile. Much more suitable than using Ghost, I'd have thought.
 
Get the oem pre installation kit and create a configuration set to get your master image then you can take an image and deploy it via wds. I take it your buying an oem version of vista.
 
If you're pushing that many installations out, wouldn't it be better to buy a VLK for Vista rather than individual OEM Licences?
 
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