ghosting

[billb]

at what stage would u recommend using ghosting products to set up pc's in a company? Having never used one like eg norton ghost is it less hassle than building a pc from scratch if u have many different pc's? or do u spend as much time sorting out all the variations / incompatabilities etc than it would take just to bung the software on?

[dontlift]

ghosting is only really effective when rolling out a large number of identical machines

[davidd]

The time it takes to install windows, office and a few apps it is worth ghosting if you have more than a couple of machines. Little point if they are not identical though.

D.

[sjg]

If you've got several machines the same (say you bought identical machines each financial year, thus 3 variations) it can make life so much easier, especially when you have a big batch come in.

At my last company I created an automated windows install CD which you'd just boot from, it would sort out the partitions, install windows (with latest SP), sort out the drivers and run whatever else needed at the end of install (you have about 400mb left on the CD to play with). Will dig out the document I worked from for it. Worked very nicely for us, with all sorts of different machines - just put the CD in and come back later when it's done.

[rlk500]

Ghost is a good tool but requires managing for it to be successfull and stable. Classic case just recently, with the Blaster and NebWio virus. These required patches to the OS, how many people haven't patched the images on their servers. So when they come to build new machines they will introduce unpacthed machines onto their network.

For small numbers of builds I would use the boot CD and slipstreanming methods already described. This can get the OS and base build process done much quicker.