- Oct 28, 1999
- 62,484
- 8,345
- 126
I got 7 new Dell machines in, all exact specs, XP Pro, and Office Small Business. As SOP, I scrap the inital Dell install and ditch all the crap they have installed on there, and build one machine from scratch, install OS, all normal, apps, security patches, updates, ect, and make an image of it.
Using this image I can turn a 4 hour process into a 30 minute one, and I have a nice base image incase a machine blows up in the future. I used the same cdkey for the XP Pro and Office load in all the images. But, Microsoft, being the customer convenience first thinkers that they are, decides that us lazy and ingenuitive IT peeps out there can no longer make base installs and deploy them out to save time because activation is tied to the install keys.
Bleh.
In the past, all they cared about was you having a license for it. They didn't care how many times you used that key within a company, just so long as you could show proof that you paid for it. I tried calling up and seeing if they could give me new activation codes using my other cd-keys. No cigar. So now, I'm in on a saturday, uninstalling and reinstalling all this crap.
Joy.
Using this image I can turn a 4 hour process into a 30 minute one, and I have a nice base image incase a machine blows up in the future. I used the same cdkey for the XP Pro and Office load in all the images. But, Microsoft, being the customer convenience first thinkers that they are, decides that us lazy and ingenuitive IT peeps out there can no longer make base installs and deploy them out to save time because activation is tied to the install keys.
Bleh.
In the past, all they cared about was you having a license for it. They didn't care how many times you used that key within a company, just so long as you could show proof that you paid for it. I tried calling up and seeing if they could give me new activation codes using my other cd-keys. No cigar. So now, I'm in on a saturday, uninstalling and reinstalling all this crap.
Joy.