cloning and oem

[chrbb]

Bunch of new laptops coming, with windows 7 pro oem. We don't have volume licensing or select agreement(?) just buy equipment with oem licences.

 

Usually we buy computers in small quantities so I install software by a mixture of scripts, msi and manually. Thinking this time though of cloning, can use clonezilla with oem? Will there be an activation issue.

 

Or should I use the windows 7 image feature or just do a backup and restore?.

Edited September 23, 2010 by chrbb

[pritchardavid]

Best bet is to not activate your image and then when you deploy the image you can activate it after with the oem keys, shouldn't matter what type of licence you use with an image. Edited September 24, 2010 by pritchardavid

[dhicks]

Thinking this time though of cloning, can use clonezilla with oem? Will there be an activation issue.

 

Fog might be able to handle this - I think it can with Windows XP. For our OEM-licensed Windows XP workstations I used to simply take an image of each machine - I figured a few hundred gigabytes of storage is cheap these days.

 

--

David Hicks

[chrbb]

I'm thinking more of setting one up and then cloning or imaging the rest, rather than having an image for the future , they are idential machines but I don't want to come across any activation issues.

[tmcd35]

Does Win7 still use Sysprep? If it does you'll want to run it after you've set the first machine up how you like it, but before you copy the hard drive to an image file. This will set up Windows correctly so you won't have any network or activation issues on the clones machines. (at least that's how it's done with XP).

[chrbb]

Right changed my mind on how to do this, going to use clonezilla to take an image of each laptop for future use which is what I think DHicks was saying.

My software is mainly msi and silent exe's that I use purgos to install, with just a bit of fine tuning on each machine.

But ...... I'm wondering if this is feasible, to set up a software install ou on the server, create a load of multiple startup scripts for my silent exes, then when all is installed move the machine to it's correct ou where it will get it's msi(s).