The difference that most of you "home-built" fanatics overlook is that Apple/Dell/HP/whoever are in business to sell and support complete, operating computers, and you are not. You are supplying your own labor, which comprises researching the parts, ordering and receiving the parts, getting the correct drivers for all of those parts, assembling the computer, and installing/configuring the OS and applications. I know exactly what is involved -- I've done it several times myself. But I have concluded that it is not worth my time in dealing with the headache of doing this. It's well worth the premium to receive a pre-built computer that you just hook-up and turn on, and is guaranteed to "just work" (at least in Apple's case). This applies especially for those that are not uber-geeks.
Tell you what, give me the price you will sell your home-built system for, but only if you are able to build and ship 10,000 of them, and provide complete support for them. You have to think through all of the costs associated with that. In fact, you won't be able to determine your real costs until you've done a few hundred of them.
No, Autorun.inf will not automatically run on plain USB flash drives. Microsoft didn't think to support that. Autorun.inf will only work on CD drives. That's why U3 flash drives have firmware in them that emulates a CD drive, to trick Windows into automatically running the Autorun.inf. U3 doesn't install special drivers on the computer, Windows does that itself in response to seeing a new CD hardware device (except for Win95/98, for which you have to install some drivers).
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The difference that most of you "home-built" fanatics overlook is that Apple/Dell/HP/whoever are in business to sell and support complete, operating computers, and you are not. You are supplying your own labor, which comprises researching the parts, ordering and receiving the parts, getting the correct drivers for all of those parts, assembling the computer, and installing/configuring the OS and applications. I know exactly what is involved -- I've done it several times myself. But I have concluded that it is not worth my time in dealing with the headache of doing this. It's well worth the premium to receive a pre-built computer that you just hook-up and turn on, and is guaranteed to "just work" (at least in Apple's case). This applies especially for those that are not uber-geeks.
Tell you what, give me the price you will sell your home-built system for, but only if you are able to build and ship 10,000 of them, and provide complete support for them. You have to think through all of the costs associated with that. In fact, you won't be able to determine your real costs until you've done a few hundred of them.
No, Autorun.inf will not automatically run on plain USB flash drives. Microsoft didn't think to support that. Autorun.inf will only work on CD drives. That's why U3 flash drives have firmware in them that emulates a CD drive, to trick Windows into automatically running the Autorun.inf. U3 doesn't install special drivers on the computer, Windows does that itself in response to seeing a new CD hardware device (except for Win95/98, for which you have to install some drivers).
Yes you can use replication with MSDE. I currently have it running on a handful of laptops for one of my clients.