W7 deployment using gimagex

[Rackenford]

I am about to undertake my first deployment of 25 desktops from XP to W7. Rather than using the full Microsoft deployment software I have an idea and wanted to enquire as to viability. Tried to ask Microsoft but, halted at the, 'Give me your credit card details'.

I have a Volume Licence and was thinking if i built one machine with all the added other 3rd party software my school requires as default, i could take an image (gimagex) of that PC and deploy on all the other ones. (They are all Optiplex 320's).

I could do this prior to joining to domain so i could individually change the computer name and then just join to domain.

 

This is my first ever attempt at this and i appreciate that there may be better ways of doing this but, i have a week window and this seemed the fastest to achieve. I do not have the time to learn AIK/WDS etc.

 

Any guidance would be gratefully received.

 

Many thanks

[edutech4schools]

Post edited

 

Same as me. I had a few machines to do at a primary and did not have the need to setup wds on the server at this school. I was going to use gimagex when someone on this site pointed me to Clonezilla.

 

Both work in a situation like this although Clonezilla give you an iso to pop on a disk or use the usb tool and it is done and ready to image in 2 mins.

 

remember to run sysprep before you take the image. In its most basic form it will give each computer a unique SID key which is needed to join a server, although I a few schools that just join the laptops to the domain with the same sids but I am sure it will cause you an issue down the line.

Edited November 20, 2013 by edutech4schools

[3s-gtech]

Filezilla? That's an FTP client. Do you mean Clonezilla?

[edutech4schools]

thats the one. Its been a loooong day.

[free780]

Its not too much trouble to set up mdt.

[edutech4schools]

No, but in my case it will be a few years before the primary get another batch of computers.