I am wanting to make a disk with Microsoft office, printer drivers, adobe, flash player, novell, etc for 100 new computers that will be coming in soon. We do not have time to set these up on all of the computers, so I thought this might help. I tried to look up under "image disk", but it didn't really help. I want to be able to just put in the disk and minutes later, everything is there. Can anyone help?

1. You could try a disk drive imaging application such as Norton Ghost. Set up your first computer, and test it to make sure it is exactly the way you want it and the 99 others. Then create a Ghost image of its hard drive to be installed on the other computers.

   Be careful. You may run into licensing issues, depending on whether the computers have Windows and Office pre-installed as OEM licenses or if you use Microsoft's volume licensing. If you are at all in doubt, make a backup copy of each hard drive prior to replacing its contents with the image created by Ghost. You may still have to enter license keys and a few other parameters on each machine, but, if done right, it should save you a lot of other configuration. You may also have to activate Windows and/or Office individually on each machine.

   Also, there are sometimes compatibility problems between machines. The closer the machines are to each other in terms of make/model, hard disk type and size, type of hardware installed, etc., the more successful your image deployment is likely to be. If the machines are not very similar, then you may experience compatibility problems with disk formats, hardware abstraction layer (HAL), defined memory size, etc.

   If you are buying all 100 computers at the same time from the same vendor, you may have another alternative. Some vendors will, for a fee (and the price of the software), pre-install your software for you on each of the machines. This would achieve your desired time savings, but at an additional cost.

2. Make sure that all the 100 computers that you are getting are exactly similar. Then make an image of the one such computer and put it on one of your main Server. You can now image all your 100 computers from the network. Just make sure that you can boot up these computers from the network. You will need to figure out the Licensing aspects here.
3. This is prabably illegal even if possible. Why were the computers not ordered with appropriate software preinstalled? Maybe they were?
4. There's some info from Microsof themselves about creating exactly the kind of standard install image you're talking about here:

   http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsser…

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