Hi everyone,
We're an HP shop, running 6930p and 8440p laptops and dc7900 and 8100 desktops. We've recently started our migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 and I'm trying to find the best/fastest way to re-image our computers and get all of the drivers/software reinstalled.
We are currently using DS 6.9 to do imaging and software deployment. I built an HII and only inject the NIC drivers so sysprep can join the domain and I get connectivity with my DS afterwards. From there, we use HP's SSM utility to install the remaining applicable softpaqs for drivers/software specific to the model. Once that is complete and the machine reboots, we deploy (mostly) vendor-provided MSI's for our applications.
The imaging and sysprep parts work perfect. The biggest bottleneck that I've seen is the installation of all the softpaqs can take upwards of 30 minutes. We're only installing softpaqs that cover the device drivers and "basic" functionality, such as the QuickLaunch buttons on the laptops.
On our 10/100 network, it takes about 45 minutes from the time we start imaging to the time that SSM has done its thing, rebooted the box, and is waiting for software installation. Just dropping the image on the machine takes 15 minutes, so if we can even shrink that time by 15 minutes and get the job down to about 30 minutes that'd definitely help.
Also, related to this topic, as far as licensing goes, we do not use a KMS server so we plug in the MAK key and activate Windows via the vbscript in the FirstLogon section. If our image is over 30 days old, despite being sysprepped with the /generalize switch, we'll see a window pop up demanding activation. After a couple of minutes, the vbscript does its thing and activates Windows, but this causes a definite delay in that part of imaging. Is there anything I could do other than rebuild the image every 30 days to fix that?