Information wants to be free!
Windows Deployment Services (WDS) has the ability to search Active Directory for pre-staged computer accounts to use when deploying images. There are several benefits to this, e.g. you can choose to service only known clients that you have created and ignore others, and you don’t have to provide or generate computer names since the image …
Continue reading “Windows Deployment Service Pre-Staging and GUIDs”
In smaller deployments Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is a good, free alternative for anti-malware. If you decide to use MSE in your images, you will discover that sysprep resets the Out Of Box Experience (OOBE) settings for MSE. In other words; every user that logs on to a machine deployed from your image will see …
Continue reading “Microsoft Security Essentials, Sysprep and Group Policy”
Windows and Microsoft do a great job of providing drivers for hardware devices. A lot of drivers ship in the box with Windows and hundreds of thousands more are available online on the Windows Update site. Still you quite often end up with one or two unknown devices in Device Manager. When Windows Update or …
Continue reading “Identifying unknown devices in Device Manager”