The Best Solution For Mass Reinstalling

[james107504]

I do a lot of reinstalling for friends and family, just because i can't stand to hear people complaining about computers. Most of the time they think the problem is because Windows is a bad product, or they believe there's a physical problem with their hardware. More often than not after looking at their computer the problem is simply that their computer isn't correctly configured, or that it was never properly setup.

Since i work on individual computers, i rarely work on two computers with the same configuration. A lot of computers are direct OEMs from Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, etc. -- mostly integrated parts, never upgraded. Some systems are custom jobs, and others are just Frankensteined from leftover parts. Despite the difference in hardware, i generally setup the computers the same way. Windows, Office, Norton, Winzip, Acrobat, and all the other common applications and utilities.

My current solution for reinstalling these computers is to manually install and configure each system. As you can imagine, this process is very monotonous and time consuming. I'm always looking for a better solution, but have yet to find one. I've tried making a master installaion and ghosting/imaging it to other computers, but have had problems when the hardware of the slave computer differs too much from that of the master.

Has anyone had the same problem, and if so have you found a better solution? Does anyone know how the OEMs make the images they install on their various different systems? I would think that they don't create an image from scratch for every single different hard configuration they offer, but i could be wrong.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated, as i've been racking my brain on this for some time now.
James

 

[0roo0roo]

clean image with basic apps ghost image for each computer. thats as good as it gets. keep os partition within 5 gb for ease.

xp sp1 is most problem free. turn off hibernation or else you'l have a giant file.

 

[Juniper]

clean image with basic apps ghost image for each computer. thats as good as it gets. keep os partition within 5 gb for ease.

But ghosting is tied to the hardware right?

 

[0roo0roo]

thats why a separate one for each computer. s ure you have to do it once, but after that its much easier if the people you have to deal with f*ck up their computers, whihc you know will happen.


theres a small app that resets the hardware config of a install for images. i've never used it, but others have posted about it. its from ms.