Windows XP to Windows 7 + SSD

anything I don't mind · 20 Jan 2011 at 17:30

We are in the process of moving the site that I work at over to Windows 7 on SSD. I have been going on to my boss about how good SSD are and he has asked me to order three OCZ 2e 60gb for testing purposes, for the IT pcs. He would like me to install all the client side software to check for compatibility and so that we can demonstrate the speed difference between the normal sata and ssd. So far so good, I took the sata drive out of the HP8100E I3-550 and installed the OCZ SSD. It was a bit tricky to install because the HP machine did not have any SSD drive bay of any kind. Luckily though the OCZ comes with an SSD plate and I was able to securely fit the SSD under the dvdrom drive. All applications have installed successfully so far and as you can imagine the speed increase is dramatic.

But I can for see a few issues, one being the transition to new windows 7 user profiles and changing the login scripts.

Is anyone else planning on moving over to Windows 7 and if you are will you be considering SSD?

Are there any other considerations that you can think of or any other problems that you can for see.

We have not yet decided on how we are going to image all the pcs but i would like to do it with a pxeboot. So ideally once the ssd has been installed and we have manually changed the bios to 3gbit sata. Boot from network and it auto installs the image and it is ready to go. Any ideas on the best software/method to accomplish this?

anything I don't mind · 22 Jan 2011 at 11:25

Ok thanks for the replies. :|

Been asking other people, someone suggest using clonezilla to make the image and then put it on the network and usb boot with it and image the disk that way. But when i did this it came up with CIFS read and write errors. It might be because i was doing across the network from a CIFS share. Will try next week with that method from a local machine or similar.

I found this blog post on sysprep and have download WAIK. Will be trying to get this right, but this other guy said you can just use newsid application to change sid and pc name after install. But i am looking for the most automated approach.

What method do you find is best ?

droyden · 22 Jan 2011 at 12:45

not sure about mass roll out onto ssd, you might be better with answer files then atleast win7 will do the formatting of the drive etc.. I've used clonezilla before but not with ssd, need to be sure that its aligned. maybe if the drives are all the same it would be ok?

brainchylde · 22 Jan 2011 at 19:35

You can use Windows Deployment Toolkit to deploy Windows 7. If you can afford the investment go for SCCM/Ghost or similar - you can then use it to deploy software and do other sorts of neat things too. It largely depends how big your site is as to whether it's worth it. We use SCCM and it's a big big saver for us.

The other thing I'd say about SSD's is... does everyone really need it? We encourage most users to save files on network space as this makes re-imaging easier and much easier in the case of failure. So most users immediately lose the benefit of SSD as they aren't really working locally. If a user is primarly doing office documents an SSD is going to be a false economy, with perhaps the exception of boot time.

We've moved a whole site to SCCM (~1500 units) - there are 4 SSD's in that (in my office) but largely our users don't need SSD performance. The other difficulty you've already discovered is can you fit the SSD in to all your base units? The 4 we did were potchy and you may want to consider some sort of drive caddy to hold the SSD.

Personally if you are considering large SSD deployment I would wait for the cost to come down a bit.

mrbios · 22 Jan 2011 at 20:10

As someone who has already rolled out windows 7 (albeit 32bit) to an entire school site running mainly mandatory profiles i can answer those questions quite easily...

Deployment, WDS on Server 2008R2, it's quite easy to setup the unattended.xml files using Windows AIK for one touch setup. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754627(WS.10).aspx Lovely feature in 2008R2 where you can put all required drivers in to a driver store to be picked up when the image is deployed, saved us a hell of a lot of time considering the complete mess of different PC models we have around the place.

Depending on how you have your PCs setup - working in a school i have to have them very locked down - you may have to do a fair amount of changing to group policies as there are a lot of new settings and a lot of settings have been renamed or moved,

also for profiles see here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973289

anything I don't mind · 24 Jan 2011 at 09:13

Yes, i want to suggest SCCM because we have no software for software deployment and using group policy can get a bit messy at times.

If we do go SSD then they will all be the same pcs and the same SSD. I thought it was only when going from sata to SSD with regards to alignment. If alignment is an issue then it might be best to just do windows installs on the pcs.

We are looking to roll out windows 7 pro 32bit. Thanks for the replies will probably do a unattended install in that case.