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Comment by mojzu | Hacker News Reader

Have the options for making and installing images on windows improved? I've looked into some a while in the past for work but they always seemed to come with enough caveats that they wouldn't quite work for our case. E.g. very few of the machines have the same hardware configuration, and outside of a few bits of common software each department has its own unique software requirements and variation within departments

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To really answer this you need to separate OS image deployment from software install; put out a common base with essentially just management, security, and observability tooling in place. Then use a package management tool to roll out your LoB software. Bonus points for making that self-service so users can do it themselves.

Given how many devices use out of the box drivers, combined with the amount of drivers distributed with Windows update, that part of the story has gotten much better as well.

At work, we use SCCM to do this. You just plug the PC on the network, PXE boot, and it does its thing. You can also create a USB drive installs the same image. It then proceeds to install the third-party software via SCCM, too, so you don't need to upgrade the installation image every time a new app version is released.

One caveat is that SCCM is not free, and we have a dedicated guy managing it. Not sure how much work that entails (he's not full-time), I rarely if ever touch our Windows environment (I'm running Linux on my own machine).

Yes, since Windows 8 it's improved dramatically. I've taken hard drives from a desktop that failed and booted said hard drive in a USB enclosure on a laptop (very dissimilar hardware, obviously) and after a few minutes of Updating Device Configuration, Windows boots.

I have run into that and in my experience it doesn't make sense to have dozens of different images for all the different variations. However, after getting a baseline image, one of my employees created multiple batch files (one for each department) that is run to do a silent install of department specific software.

Yes with Windows 10 you are able to refresh the image deleting all files and software (or only software) from within the settings app.

Also there are features that allow downloading the install image from Microsoft servers similar to what Apple has had for years. But this might be a enterprise customers only feature.

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