Building laptops with USB Ethernet adapter due to no built-in network socket

[DrBeaker]

Hi All,

 

Has anyone got any laptops without a built-in network socket?

 

We've got a bunch of Dell Latitude 3189 laptops that are built via PXE boot using a Dell USB-ethernet adapter. This is because the devices don't have an in-built network socket. Windows 10 installs fine via UEFI and Secure boot settings, but everytime they are built, there's a load of missing drivers, but the drivers are on the RM CC4 server. The drivers can be updated via Windows update manually and via Dell's support page. But the Windows build + drivers fails every single time.

 

Has anyone had similar sort of problems with laptops like this?

 

Thanks

[SYNACK]

Had good luck using MDT in this kind of setup. Even with generic USB NICs you can boot an mdt deploy image from USB stick or CD. As long as the NIC drivers are integrated it works fine.

 

Not sure what RM builds in but I am aware that you need to be very careful with driver selection profiles and Intel drivers. I have had deployments fail massively as it picked up a generation before or after of Intel drivers and messed the whole install.

[Katy]

We've got 40 Lenovos like this, use a USB3->Network adapter and also a USB drive that has the SCCM boot image on it. Boots up, runs the task sequence like normal and pulls all its drivers as usual.

[jmak]

^^ That's what I did - albeit I had to boot from USB as I only had generic adapters which the Surface Pros don't recognise for pxe boot. Once booted, the MDT prices worked across the network. The drivers came down from MDT with the task sequence.

[Areku]

we have some surface pros here, and we can network boot using the official surface usb3 adapter, we have however had issues with cheaper third party ones.

[mavhc]

https://plugable.com/2013/10/27/supporting-pxe-over-usb-deployment-scenarios-for-tablets-and-ultrabooks/