but it will cost us around $70,000!
Wow you must have a ton of machines. I'm pretty sure they have volume discounting (unless this is the volume quote you got, yikes!)
But look hard at Ghost 7.5. It is IMO the absolute best enterprise imaging solution. In v7.5, you no longer need boot floppies and boot partitions when imaging a machine. You build the client software into your image, and when you run a task on that machine, it reboots into a "virtual partition." Also, you can now do unicasting, as well as throttled multicasting, to give your network a break. Unicasting sounds like you can only image one machine at a time, but I have sucessfully imaged 15 at once, using unicast, with no hit on the network at all. You can probably do more machines, but I didnt try.
There is also a very comprehensive package builder with Ghost 7.5. You can package together software packages that may have not been included in your site image, and then push them out using Ghost. The packages will then install, with little or no input needed from the user (you decide how much input you want the user to have).
Ghost works well with Sysprep, if you have win2k boxes.
There are (few) other alternatives to Ghost, and none of them are as full featured as Ghost. Ghost was always a huge time saver, and now with the virtual partitions, you never have to visit a machine again.
