NZ Tekonverse

With all of the experience I have amassed in Windows 7 imaging this year and with our experiences of different technologies it is becoming abundantly clear what works and what doesn’t, for the number of computers that we have. What doesn’t: MDT. Although this has a great deal of promise it is too complex for…

A couple of posts back I wrote about getting a native VHD down to a smaller size to use on a system with a smaller HDD than what it was originally built on. That time I just used standard defrag along with shrinking in Disk Management. This time around that wasn’t going to get the…

There are some scenarios that DISM doesn’t work in as you would expect. When I set up a reference image for a new platform, because of my imaging topology I have images that are pre-sysprep, post-sysprep and post-dism. Generally I would choose a pre-sysprep image, but then it has to be mucked around with and…

Today I tried putting a laptop bootable VHD image onto a different laptop. I had tried this before and it wouldn’t boot. There are two problems actually: The VHD file when expanded to its full size (126 GB) which happens at boot time, was then too big to fit on the available space of the…

I’ve operated a personal Trademe account for a couple of years. I only traded a small amount of stuff and haven’t had to ship anything that I can remember. Earlier this year I opened a work account and started to sell surplus computer equipment that we had had, which has brought in a small but…

Last time I wrote about the difficulties we had experienced with the standalone Google Chrome installer that is supposed to install for all users. Although I was not able to get support in the Chrome forum, I have discovered today that Google is producing Chrome in an enterprise edition. As the article I was reading…

I have just completed making our laptop image (also 64 bit) and that is to be tested shortly. I used MDT to make the previous deploy but now I am switching to native VHD as well. It looks like the laptop VHD is OK and there are no problems. So this means we can ditch…

Having completed the deployment of computers for student use the next task is to create the image for staff laptops. At this point we need a boot media for Windows PE x64 and traditionally I would have created a boot CD. But the Windows PE walkthroughs create one that seems to be a waste of…

This is my first post since the big earthquake hit Christchurch on 22nd February. I’m not going to write here on the earthquake itself except to say that we have been closed for the past 14 days and will reopen next week. At the moment I am just picking up where things have been 14…

If you haven’t heard of Rearm (or SkipRearm before) then this is a tricky little thing that Microsoft has introduced into Windows Vista and Windows 7, as part of the more complex activation thingys. And it is an annoying thing. Any one image can only be sysprepped three times before you get this thing kicking…