You guys showed a virtual windows that you were keeping up-to-date and driver-less to make new windows installs simpler in one of your videos, any chance we could get a separate video on the setup?
I found that very interesting as well. Having an upto date blank for say benchmarking. Where you just DD the image to a machine and install the video driver.
When you download Windows from the Media Creation Tool it comes all the major upgrades already installed and needs just a few downloads to be 100% up to date. Also Windows install pretty quicly on decent machines so I think it's just a complications doing things that way.
That only has all the updates and no configuration though.
They were also talking about making the typical adjustments (displaying file-extensions, turning off the NSA and stuff like that) on the clone-source, maybe even having steam up-to-date etc.
When your cloning a lot of machines (200+) those updates mean alot in terms of bandwidth. And with how unreliable cache servers are with the microsoft CDNs it would be nice to just have 1 image always updated and ready to go.
That's a completly different story. In that case you, if you have mostly the same machine, you can just install Windows on one and make an image of that installation without having to rely on a VM.
I remember that I used a special command to move my OEM Windows to a new PC and this command (which I don't rememeber unfortunately) basically resets the OS drivers (not completly but to a reasonable level. I had to format anyway because moving from a Q6600 to a 4790K was too big of a jump). If you make an image of that installation you're good to go.
I've done it before (I've had to clone close to 1000 drives over the last 3 years) but with 6 groups of different hardware (the pcs are sponsored by Dell/Alienware and given in batches) it gets tedious. Right now we maintain 8 computers with different images and just mass clone from the one over the network that we need at the time. The problem lies in that some of those 8 masters arent needed except for one time out of the year so I'd like to be able to keep it all to one master and just batch install drivers on the first time run over the network. Thats why I was interested in the Virtual Machine that they had shown in previous videos as I have never done it that way before, its always been a group of physical machines locked in the server room.