Wednesday, July 7, 2010

New Windows 7 System Deployment

Some of you might be familiar with Windows 7 and the process of running a system rating and registering the system.

Currently, we are going through a system refresh and need to deploy a couple hundred Windows 7 systems. We used Ghost and created an image, imaged the machines, and Sysprepped them.

In order to deploy these machines, we decided we needed to automate as much of the process as possible, reducing the human error factor and ensuring no step is missed - although we do have a checklist that is to be completed with each system deployed.

We created a few batch files that make use of VBscript files and some freeware single file applications.

One of the steps when logging onto the system as an administrator after configuring network settings and joining the domain is to simply run the System Rating utility and register Windows 7. Fortunately, both of these utilities have command-line versions. We simply added these commands to a batch file, along with other useful commands, and have the tech run them during the installation process.

The commands are:

slmgr -ato
winsat formal

You can easily add these to your own batch files and hopefully save yourself some time and perform other important steps while these utilities run.

On occasion, we have seen the system rating suffer due to performing other tasks and need to re-run the system rating utility. This is extremely rare, however - maybe 5 out of 250 systems or so.

1 comment:

  1. On this point, at last year's QCon keynote he did speak about this. Paraphrasing but he said that while he pushed for virtualization of texture resources in hardware in the end a software approach might actually be better from a developer's PoV because you do not have to mess with different IHV implementations of it (i.e. in OGL extensions) and his code can do exactly what he wants with no superfulous (or missing) features, like he's did with id Tech 5.

    ReplyDelete