Any IT department worth their salt will have solved this problem years ago. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never managed Windows in an enterprise setting but there’s a reason that profit-hungry corporations all use Windows. Here’s the full process for getting any Windows laptop to work perfectly:
unbox the laptop and turn it on
insert the USB key with the provisioning package
wait about two seconds for Windows to tell you to remove the USB key.
go to lunch
If they have a channel supplier that offers ‘white glove’ service they don’t even need to do that and they can even have brand new laptops drop-shipped to a user at home without ever needing to touch it. And if that laptop fucks up down the line it can just be wiped and as soon as Windows connects to the Internet it can automatically re-enrol itself into the organisation’s management system.
With PXE boot you don’t even need a USB. Boot into the imaging “OS” over the network.
My workplace has a couple of dedicated network switches on a dedicated “imaging” VLAN in the hardware room, that way normal users can’t accidentally reimage their own machine. I think the desktop guys can get 32 going at once, and the complete automated setup time for one is like 40 minutes.
I’m currently losing the fight with my second level (whom supplies our PXE server) about keeping it. They tried setting it up twice since September, the first worked the first time I used it, then never again after that. The second never worked as far as I can tell.
They say that it’s “being depreciated”, and therefore should be dropped.
Any IT department worth their salt will have solved this problem years ago. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never managed Windows in an enterprise setting but there’s a reason that profit-hungry corporations all use Windows. Here’s the full process for getting any Windows laptop to work perfectly:
If they have a channel supplier that offers ‘white glove’ service they don’t even need to do that and they can even have brand new laptops drop-shipped to a user at home without ever needing to touch it. And if that laptop fucks up down the line it can just be wiped and as soon as Windows connects to the Internet it can automatically re-enrol itself into the organisation’s management system.
With PXE boot you don’t even need a USB. Boot into the imaging “OS” over the network.
My workplace has a couple of dedicated network switches on a dedicated “imaging” VLAN in the hardware room, that way normal users can’t accidentally reimage their own machine. I think the desktop guys can get 32 going at once, and the complete automated setup time for one is like 40 minutes.
I’m currently losing the fight with my second level (whom supplies our PXE server) about keeping it. They tried setting it up twice since September, the first worked the first time I used it, then never again after that. The second never worked as far as I can tell. They say that it’s “being depreciated”, and therefore should be dropped.