Setting up computers quickly?

[neokill3r]

Hello, I hope I have this in the right place.

My friend just opened a computer shop, and I'm helping him out. One thing we spend a ridiculous amount of time on is setting up new computers. The thing that takes the most time is windows updates.

So I was wondering if there was a faster way to do this. I looked up ghosting but a lot of sites say that on different hardware it doesn't work so good. Is newer ghosting software able to deal with this better?

Also, Having some disks with all the windows updates would save a lot of time as well. I found this site - http/support.microsoft.com/kb/913086 which has all these windows updates, but I'm not sure if this is what I'm looking for. If it is, would running from deamon tools work instead of burning 10 cds?

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[r_manic]

I don't understand why ghosting wouldn't work well with different types of hardware... unless you're using different specs?

If you're using a bunch of computers with the same specs, your best bet is still to set up everything on one computer, then ghost whatever's on the hard disks to the drives of the other computers.

 

[neokill3r]

It doesn't work because the HAL is different. Updating the drivers is not possible because it will bluescreen before windows starts. The results on google were pretty much random, some took the ghost and some didn't.

There not really new computers, just computers that need a reformat. Sometimes the customers bring in new stuff, sometimes really old stuff.

If newer ghosting software can update the HAL by itself, then I would really like that, but if that doesn't work the updates will work too.

I think those are the updates, but I'm not sure which month to start at. When I run them in deamon it seems to execute and close fine, but shouldn't it ask for a restart since its an update?

 

[neokill3r]

Damn, I should've posted in the wrong place. The hardware section is the only place people reply.

 

[neokill3r]

I posted in the wrong place so more then one person would reply.

The only problem is some mod came in, posted something that wasn't very helpful, then locked the thread so no one else could help me.Then he has the nerve to make his post the most helpful when it didn't help me at all.


I found several articles on google about how you can do this, and I come here and they say I can't? If you preinstall the drivers first, you can do it. I just don't know how to do that.

Also, you can have like a dell, hp and compaq ghost image, some people had success with that.

 

[Ijack]

Have you thought of setting up a Windows Server Updating Services server? That way the updates would all be sourced locally, which would be much quicker than downloading them from the Internet every time.