David D’Souza, the Director of Development in the Windows Core OS Division, wrote an article about the reasons why Microsoft used imaging technology for the setup process of Windows Vista. It is interesting to note that installation speed seems to be the main advantage in his view. We use imaging technology since we deploy Windows NT, and performance was never the reason why we preferred it over unattended installations.

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The Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007 includes many important tools for Windows Vista deployment. Most important is the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) which contains ImageX, Microsoft’s new imaging tool, and Windows Deployment Services (WDS), the successor of Remote Installation Services (RIS). Please check out my summary about Windows Vista’s deployment tools for more information. BDD 2007 Beta 2 extends Beta 1 with a couple of new features.

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According to Microsoft, you can apply a Windows Vista image to PCs with different Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). You only need different images for computers with 32 bit and 64 bit CPUs. This sounds like a revolution for Windows imaging and deployment. So I was quite curious to try this killer feature of Windows Vista.

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Windows Deployment Services (WDS) is the successor of Remote Installation Services (RIS), and can be used to deploy Windows Vista and older Windows versions. In this review I’ll be discussing the experiences I had with WDS.

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For every installation of Windows Vista, you need an image in the WIM format. One great feature of WIM images is that you can mount and inject them with device drivers or other files. In this post, I will be explaining how to mount an image in a WIM file with ImageX. ImageX is the tool for capturing and applying images. But it can also be used to modify an image. This article is based on Windows Vista Beta 2.

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In this post, I am going to introduce some important concepts of Windows Vista‘s imaging technology. Every Windows system administrator has to learn about this sooner or later since imaging is the only way to install Windows Vista.

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I am preparing an article for a German magazine about Windows Vista‘s new features from a system administrator‘s point of view. I would like to share some of the results of my research here. In this post, you will find a list of Microsoft’s free deployment tools for Windows Vista with short descriptions.

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If you use an imaging tool to deploy Windows, you probably know Microsoft’s free SysPrep tool which is part of the Windows XP Service Pack 2 Deployment Tools. It is useful to configure Windows after the cloning process. Most importantly, it creates a unique SID for the machine. SysPrep Driver Scanner is a free tool which scans a computer for system device drivers and adds them to the sysprep.inf.

You probably know the System Restore tool of Windows XP. It allows you to restore a former state of your Windows machine if your current setup has problems. Addlogix SnapShot Professional does the same, but in a much more professional way.

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