Ghost Solution Suite

I am about to purchase 35 lenovo yoga 2 laptops running windows 7 with 4gb ram and 256gb ssd and core i5. they will all be configured the same with lots of testing software and a very specific config. i only will have 4-5 days to turn these around and get them in the hands of the engineers and if i have to configure each one it will take weeks. Is it possible to create a master perfect config and then clone that image to a bootable usb stick then plug that into the other 34 machines and load over the top of the existing software making all of them identical. is it also possible to virtualise that image and update and upgrade the software then re image for updates going forward? Then i can plan sending updates to the core software in phases? any advice greatly accepted.

Let me start out with a simple question - how are you planning to handle the Window 7 licensing?  To create a single image which you then "duplicate" to other machines requires a Multiple Activation Key (MAK) license as a standard retail license is not intended to be used for multiple machines, and it is likely that activation will quickly stop working if you try this with a retail key.

The mechanics of cloning a gold image to other machines is quite straightforward using Ghost Solution Suite, Paragon Partition Manager, Acronis, or any of the other imaging solutions available to you. I would suggest using a USB hard disk rather than a key as the performance of keys is quite slow unless you buy a top of the line key (probably more expensive than a hard disk).  Also, if you have a large image, you may need to reformat USB keys to an NTFS file system.