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PC Cloning Solution?
pbaumgar asks: "Like many here on Slashdot, I'm a Systems Administrator. I have become responsible for maintaining about 300 laptops that I need to rebuild on a regular basis. I am looking for a solution to image them. I've been looking at Symantec's Ghost Solution Suite and am not too gung-ho on spending all that money for licensing. Can anyone recommend an better solution that would be cheaper?"
I've worked in large scale corporate environments (400+ workstations) configured for RIS and there's no equivalent. You can dynamically add/change/update images. You can roll in patches for the heck of it in a matter of moments. You never need to worry about where your install media is, you just press F12 and you have a new SOE image on the workstation. You never have to burn off new copies of your install media because it's all live. The admin who set up RIS also set up a diagnostic boot using the RIS network boot that loaded disk recovery tools and so on from the RIS server. The cost of RIS is included with the Windows server license (so yes, beer free) and the ongoing costs will be lower as your updates will cost you less in terms of build media and so on.
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