Setting up quickly

[neokill3r]

My friend just opened a computer repair shop, and I'm helping him out. One thing we spend a ridiculous amount of time on is reformating and windows updates.

So I was wondering if there was a faster way to do this. I looked up ghosting but a lot of sites say that on different hardware it doesn't work so good. Sometimes the HAL is so different, it will bluescreen before windows even starts, so updating drivers won't work. Is newer ghosting software able to deal with this better?

Also, Having some disks with all the windows updates would save a lot of time as well. I found this site - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913086 which has all these windows updates, but I'm not sure if this is what I'm looking for. Also, some are in 2 parts and I don't know which one I need.

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[wuzy]

Unless all computers have the same spec. like the bunch I administer in an office where imaging/ghosting is very useful, you're going have to do it the old traditional way, tendering each machine individually with various drivers and software.
In the past I used 'Autopatcher' after clean installing, now I just use Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) running off Windows Server.

Anyway, good luck. I don't have much fond memories of my PC techie days while still in high school. Customers (both them and their PCs) are a real PITA to handle if you want to achieve a high rep. shop.

 

[will_chellam]

Ghosting is really only an option if you're turning over a decent amount of identical machines - if you do this you need to ghost the hard-disk drive before you activate windows and put in the cd-key, or change the cd key on each machine afterwards otherwise you'll end up selling customers pc's with illegal copies of windows.

The other main use for cloning the hard disks is in corporate setups where you might need to change the default installation on, say 100pcs in one go.

 

[r_manic]

Best answer selected by r_manic.

 

[r_manic]

This topic has been closed by R_manic