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Installing Windows with Recent Updates?
MoJo asks: "As a computer technician, I have to re-install Windows often. It takes three attempts to complete Windows Update (get latest update software, validate Windows, download updates). It seems like all this clicking could be scripted somehow, but I can find no-one who has found a way of reducing the whole painful affair to just one or two clicks." Is there a way to build a Windows installation CD that includes the most recent set of updates?
For a completely different, Free Software suggestion,
try unattended at http://unattended.sourceforge.net/ Haven't used this at work but uses a Linux or windows server, a boot disk and you write the Perl scripts. Seems like a neat project, installs programs and does all the rebooting for you.
The university I work at recieves them from Dell with images, apps included we just do the 3 or so non-critical fixes since the image was sent to Dell.
this link on slipstreaming is quite interesting; btw, did you note that all necessary operations are carried by command line interface, and that in all commands (such as in "xpsp2.exe -x:c:\sp2 " ) the options are expressed as dashes, and not slashes ? Since when did Windows people start working as Unix/Linux people everdyday do?
You could always setup a caching proxy server in front of your internal network. This wouldn't make the process any fewer clicks, but it would save a lot of time downloading fixes and things. The first time you download a fix, it would be cached on the server, and all the remaining machines that need the fix would grab it from the local network. This would speed things up, if nothing else.
We can't compete with Dell, because they can use those cheap (and shitty) restore CDs at half the cost of OEM Windows licences.
Although you can add a proper Windows CD for 5.88GBP when you buy and configure a machine on Dell's website
What I did when I worked at a computer repair shop, is I downloaded all of the updates manually to our server, I looked up unattended installation switches for each update and put them in a text file, and then Auto-installed everything over the network with a VBScript program I wrote. Worked pretty good, I even set it up so that it would install SP2, reboot, auto-log back in, install the rest of the updates, then reboot again. It worked great b/c I could just start it and walk away. I knew it was done when I walked back by the computer and it was at the login screen after the last reboot.