Win 7 deployments - who's "doing it" then?

[Slipbye]

Welcome MrHoff, i'm a bit new around here myself hehe

The Copy to is a right pain but the way we got round it here was to manually copy the profile to our share.

Then rename the folder to whatever you want it and put .V2 on the end so studentman.V2 for the folder name.

Deleted Appdata\Local and Appdata\Locallow from the profile folder.

Launch Regedit on the fileserver where we stored the profile.

Select hkey_users and then load the hive from ntuser.dat in your profile folder.

change the permissions on the hive so you delete the old user and add everyone full control.

unload the hive from regedit.

then rename ntuser.dat to .man.

Make sure when you point to your profile in AD you don't add the \studentman.V2 as it dosen't need the .v2 in the name as AD uses the v2 to tell the difference between win7 profile/xp etc. just point it to studentman for example.

I'm pulling this from memory but if it dosen't work let me know and i'll double check it for you.


Ontopic.

After Iceskaiting uphill for a few day's all workstations/laptops are deployed with win7 here, servers have been virtualised and all dc's are now 2008r2. Just waiting for the start of term now and tidying up some cabeling etc.

[Trapper]

Slipbye, nice one. Works a treat.

Was annoyed to find that MS have removed this feature. Not every can sysprep all profile changes. The Copy to option was very flexible and worked well.

Only change I had to make was to change where BGInfo saves it's .bmp, as it is removed from %WinDir% as soon as the file is created. Moving the save location to a folder in C: root works fine however.

I'm currently just playing around with it at home. Running Server 2008 R2 and 7 Enterprise in VMs. Taking a look at Exch 2010, sadly I have far too little RAM to run them all at the same time!

[Great_Scott]

I admire anyone who has the courage to take that "first step" and deploy a new MS OS so soon to their network, good luck! As for me, I have been testing it on a VM at home since first release, I do like it and a lot of other people from various sources are shouting good things about it too but something is giving me doubts that it is as good as it seems and I'm definitely thinking it is far too soon for deployment. Call me over cautious or whatever but I have to follow my gut instinct as I have done in the past.

I don't mind waiting another year or longer if needs be.........

[ranj]

Maybe this very useful video on lite deployment of windows 7 in the enterprise may help.

Word of warning though the video is over an hour long but goes into great detail about deploying windows 7. Worth watching if you are planning on using microsoft deployment toolkit 2010.

http://blip.tv/play/hIxygauBaQI

Courtesy of Nicky Curtis and co of IT idiots.

[Ben-BSH]

With windows 7 do you not have to put domain\username or username@domain to login? this would be a nightmare at our school, if i am correct in my assumption the CTRL ALT DEL screen is out, and the welcome screen with no drop down for domain is in..

[DrCheese]

With windows 7 do you not have to put domain\username or username@domain to login? this would be a nightmare at our school, if i am correct in my assumption the CTRL ALT DEL screen is out, and the welcome screen with no drop down for domain is in..

You can set the default domain in policy so just typing in the username works. You will have to type machinename\username if you want to log on locally tho, but from what I recall there's a popup that shows the machine name on the login screen

[TheCrust]

Yup - the only time we ever have to put DOMAIN\Username or username@domain in to log on to any of our workstations is when we log on as the domain administrator.

It seems if an account name exists locally (as it will with the Administrator account) then the machines will default to try and log you on locally. If the account doesn't exist locally - as user logons generally won't - then it will not require any domain prefix/suffix adding and just go straight to the network for authentication.