Driver harvest?

[agarabaghi]

Am im doing this wrong...

 

Whenever we get a new model of computers i go to the manuf website and put in the service tag and download every driver, extract the files and then import them into MDT out of box drivers.

 

Is there a simplere more efficient way to do this with WDS / MDT? We dont have sccm setup yet...

[Arthur]

Is there a simplere more efficient way to do this

Yes. Download Dell's driver CAB files.

 

Dell Driver CAB files for Enterprise Client OS Deployment « Dell Community

[agarabaghi]

whoa! sweet man!

[agarabaghi]

whooops i didnt read!

[featured_spectre]

Another vote for the Driver CAB.

 

What OS are you installing as a base? I ask as from Windows 7 onwards they pick up drivers themselves, so you can blitz the same image out to different brand machines and 99% they pick up all the drivers once connected to the net.

[agarabaghi]

windows 7, but we ran into an issue with some lenovo machines that if i didnt grab the rapid driver certain program would not install. Strange issue, and cause a lot of issues, so i like to go through the download lists as thoroughly as posssible. The cab option seems really nice!

 

How do u load the cab into mdt, jsut point to it and it extracts it ?

[Arthur]

How do u load the cab into mdt, just point to it and it extracts it?

Extract files from cab and then import into MDT. Btw, Lenovo have recently started making driver packs for SCCM/MDT too.

 

http://download.lenovo.com/express/sccm.html

 

Rather than importing every single driver into MDT, you may want to take the approach described below and only install the drivers you need.

 

www.deploymentresearch.com/Research/tabid/62/EntryId/104/Back-to-basics-Finding-Lenovo-drivers-and-certify-hardware-control-freak-style.aspx

[tiptronic13]

another great tool for lenovo...

 

Lenovo Support Express - Home

[jamesfed]

HP do the same as well now with most of their models of business class PCs

 

Just wish Toshiba did the same so I didn't have to wade through 12+ pages of junk (even after filtering it by OS!)