How do Dell / Gateway handle their OS Installs?

[TruePaige]

These big companies use a lot of different parts (motherboard, graphics cards, etc..) even in their own product lines, buying in batches of whatever is cheaper many times.

Do they have a specific method they use to install? Do they just bundle all the possible drivers that could be in that batch in their windows install?

How do they load their HDD's? Do they have a machine that just puts the Windows install and Recovery partition on the HDD's?

Just curious.

 

[FoBoT]

images, like ghost

when we buy mass computers (usually about 15,000/year) from HP, we provide our own ghost image to them, then they have an OEM process to blow the image onto the boxes as they are built out so our unique OS and applications are already on the computers when they arrive at our offices

 

[Kabrinski]

Originally posted by: FoBoT
images, like ghost

when we buy mass computers (usually about 15,000/year) from HP, we provide our own ghost image to them, then they have an OEM process to blow the image onto the boxes as they are built out so our unique OS and applications are already on the computers when they arrive at our offices

Same with one of my last jobs. Had gotten a good few thousand PCs and an equal number of laptops, all of which they just ghosted our image onto them. They just slam them and ship 'em out. All of them had basic apps that everyone used, then we installed others based on need.

 

[TruePaige]

Originally posted by: FoBoT
images, like ghost

when we buy mass computers (usually about 15,000/year) from HP, we provide our own ghost image to them, then they have an OEM process to blow the image onto the boxes as they are built out so our unique OS and applications are already on the computers when they arrive at our offices

Well I use images a lot myself on some of our laptops.

But I figure that they have a lot of hardware variation, so I'm wondering how they make it so the drivers are always configured properly.

Also when they image the drives, do they have a way of mass imaging drives before they are put into the PC's?

Seems like even 15,000 PC's would take a long time to put an image onto otherwise.

 

[Cruisin1]

There's applications out there to deploy on a big scale... altiris has one and IBM has Remote Deployment Manager.

 

[Kelemvor]

When we used Dells at a previous company, we had our image and they had theirs in front of ours.

Their image would detect the model of the machine and install the drivers and then our would install everything else and run our automated script.

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: TruePaige

But I figure that they have a lot of hardware variation, so I'm wondering how they make it so the drivers are always configured properly.

they really don't have that many hardware variations. and windows is pretty good about configuring drivers properly. windows is installing the appropriate drivers when going through the initial setup from an OEM.

Seems like even 15,000 PC's would take a long time to put an image onto otherwise.

they've got huge rooms for doing that.