This article gives an overview of Microsoft's free Windows 7 deployment tools Windows Optimized Desktop Solution Accelerator, Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 4.0, Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT), and Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor.

Microsoft has created a remarkable collection of free deployment tools for Windows 7. If the last OS you deployed was Windows XP, which was released nine years ago, then you might be interested in knowing about the available technology that helps you get rid of this hopelessly outdated operating system. In this post I will give you a short description of all Windows deployment tools that help you plan installations and evaluate hardware and software compatibility. In the next post I will discuss tools to prepare the Windows 7 master image. In the final post of this series I will introduce Microsoft’s free utilities to deliver the OS image—that is, install Windows 7 on your network.

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Microsoft's free Windows 7 deployment tools from the WAIK (partly) are essential for every Windows admin: Windows Deployment Services (WDS), Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT), User State Migration Tool (USMT), Windows Easy Transfer, Key Management Service (KMS), Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT), Windows 7 Security Compliance Management Toolkit.

Once you have planned your Windows 7 deployment and prepared your Windows 7 master images with their answer files, you are ready to deliver the images to your PCs. This article gives an overview of Microsoft’s free Windows 7 installation tools.

Windows Deployment Services (WDS)

WDS is one of the major enhancements in Windows Server 2008 and is also available for Windows Server 2003 SP2. This tool enables small and mid-sized organizations to deploy Windows. Its main limitations compared to more sophisticated commercial deployment tools are that you can only install Windows remotely within a subnet (see discussion below) and that it lacks scheduling features, and supervision capabilities. I reviewed the Windows Server 2008 WDS a while back. The Windows Server 2008 R2 version comes with the following improvements: dynamic driver provisioning, Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) deployment, additional multicast functionality, PXE provider for Transport Server, and additional EFI functionality.

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This article gives an overview of the most important Windows 7 Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) tools: WSIM, ImageX, DISM, Sysprep and Windows PE.

In my last article I introduced those free Microsoft’s deployment tools that help you plan Windows 7 deployment. Today, I will give you an overview of the tools that you can use to prepare the image of your Windows 7 master installation. The most important tool collection certainly is the Windows Automated Installation Kit. This kit is usually abbreviated as WAIK, but in Microsoft’s documentation it is called Windows AIK. The first four tools described in this article are most essential. The WAIK contains a few additional useful command line tools, such as BCDboot (set up a system partition) and DrvLoad (adds out-of-box drivers to a booted Windows PE image), but I don’t discuss them here. I will discuss the WAIK’s installation tools in part 3.

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