XP Home Deployment

[PeterH]

Does anyone have any experience of using Windows Deployment Services to deploy Windows XP Home? Is it even possible? Can you use Sysprep like you do on XP Pro?

 

It's possible that we may end up with a large number of Netbooks with XP Home or maybe even Win7 home and I need to find a way to easily load the OS onto them. We already use WDS for XP Pro desktops so I'd like to stick with the same thing if possible.

 

The main concern is product activation - if I'm correct each XP Home installation has to be activated individually with Microsoft?

 

We're just looking at options at the moment. If it's going to be too much trouble, I'll recommend that the machines are purchased with XP/Win7 Pro. This would be my favoured option by far. But as they're only going to be used to connect to terminal services, I didn't want to spend extra £££s on Pro licenses if we could get away without it.

[sted]

yup technically xphome will need activasting on each individual pc im not syure if wds can use it or not offhand but you can sysprep it just some of the options are not relevant/supported

 

option 2 set up one as you want DONT sysprep and use ghost and ghostwalker to deploy the image techinically they will all be using the same product key (make sure its activated before pulling the image) but it should work on identical hardware without having to manually activate them all.

 

i assume fog can do pretty much the same thing possibly with the addition of newsid added into the image as a runonce command possibly

[Arthur]

The main concern is product activation - if I'm correct each XP Home installation has to be activated individually with Microsoft?

Was Windows XP Home pre-installed on the laptops/netbooks and were they purchased from a "Royalty OEM" like Dell or HP?

 

If so, you may be in luck...

http://www.msfn.org/board/creating-multi-unattended-royalty-oem-xp-home-disc-t110835.html

http://www.msfn.org/board/building-pre-activated-cd-existing-installation-t63258.html