1 image for 20 machines

[rich_kildow]

I'm a high school science teacher and the closest thing to tech support we have on staff. I've been asked to maintain 20 computers that are not associated with our network (other than wireless internet connections) and therefore don't boot with a network image as do the rest of the computers. They are all windows 7 Pro 2GoPC's.

Rather than going to each one individually to keep it up to date and install software, I'm thinking I will create a system image from one that is good to go using the build in Window's utility, and then restore each of the machines with that image. A major advantage I see to this is if a student screws something up, I can just restore it back to the original image. Also, if the computer needs to get reset next year, I can update the image and restore each machine in the same manner.

Since they are all identical machines, there shouldn't be any hardware issues requiring me to "generalize" the image, right? When restoring a machine to run that image, will I be asked to put in the windows product ID or am I going to run into a problem there? Is there a better way to be doing this?

[modru2004]

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...40(WS.10).aspx

this should tell you most of what you were asking.

[rich_kildow]

Thanks, that is exactly what I needed.

[Heckler]

Can the PCs commincate with each other or are they isolated? If they are isolated there really shouldn't be any need to create a new SID for each machine. So you may want to try by passing the sysprep process all together as it will save you time.

[rich_kildow]

The machines are not networked together in any way beyond sharing a wireless connection when they are at school.

Since they are all identical machines (the serial numbers are almost sequential) running the exact same hardware and using the same external drivers, I have been finding that I should just be able to apply the image to each machine without making the image generic with sysprep.

[hunter4u]

one image should work for all of them, without using system prep, but you need to rename each one after the imaging..like use the last 3 digits of the serial # to keep them seperate.

like 2GoPC-111
2GoPC-112 etc.....
should be good to go, atleast it works for me with all the xtabs we run at work with xppro