Microsoft Signature Edition
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@scottalanmiller They've been selling quite a range of OEM gear for quite a while. I first became familiar with the Microsoft Store when they released the original Surface Pro.
You want an inexpensive 13" HP Stream, they have it. You want one of those sharp, minimal bezel Dell XPS laptops, they have it. Their selection is pretty decent from low to high.
http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/home -
I get emails from the Microsoft store but I guess I have never logged into it to see what they actually offered there.
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@scottalanmiller said:
As I've always promoted, everyone (IT pros, home users, etc.) should always reinstall their OS (and for servers, set up their own RAID) from scratch and never accept pre-installed systems. All Microsoft is doing is doing half of what I already consider a best practice and most people have always had at their disposal if they just bothered a little.
I have never done this and never seen the point of doing it. What crapware do you lot get that is causing an issue? The most recent HP PCs that I've bought came with Foxit PDF and Norton Security Essentials. It was a two-minute job to uninstall them. There is also some HP software which some people may like (theft recovery, drive encryption, support assistant) - I wouldn't describe it as crapware, but again, it's a two-minute job to uninstall.
I find uninstalling software far easier that scratching around for the right drivers post re-install.
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@Carnival-Boy yep those are the crap we're talking about. Almost no one I know (and currently I can't think of a single person who does) uses any of that crap, Foxit has gone the way of Adobe adding other junk along with their PDF viewer, Norton was probably a 30 day trial - do you really recommend Norton? and the HP software - again, none I know uses any of it.
Uninstalls for whatever reason never seem to be clean. Tons of junk gets left around, directories, registry entries, files, etc.
With HP (and Dell too), as long as you are installing the OS that came with the unit I've never had an issue getting all the driver from their website. Lenovo is a bit more of a pain, but I can generally find them there too. Now, once we leave these top three that's a whole different story. Had an Asus that I never did find a driver for one device or another.
Reinstalling Windows 8.1 from USB stick assuming I've already downloaded the drivers takes me about 20 mins from start to finish. Installing updates, well that depends on your internet connection.
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Those are good examples. I don't even fire up new machines until I've installed an OS so I am rarely aware of what would even be there anymore. But I'm sure Norton trials and Foxit and lots of tool bars and weird things that take over functions that otherwise already exist in the OS are the main things to be found.
Uninstalling was never reliable, especially with Norton. Problems often linger.
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I've never experienced any problems uninstalling this crap.
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I always reinstall new machines I buy for personal use with an OEM copy of Windows. When you buy business-grade equipment, it comes with a lot less bloatware than retail computers, but still. A vanilla copy of Windows is SOOOOOOO much better than retail copies...
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I've never experienced any problems uninstalling this crap.
I've had tons of issues, a few at home, mostly at clients. It takes quite some time, not just a few minutes, to uninstall that stuff. You have to do several reboots, you have to keep going into the Programs dialogue, you have to go through the list and make sure that you have gotten everything. It's typically close to a dozen things to remove and there are some that fall into a grey area and you aren't sure if you should remove them or not. I find that it typically takes thirty minutes or more (in consulting time, that's like a $60 charge just to clean up software!)
And then, even after being removed, problems remain. Common problems include buggy network stacks (generally caused by AV removal) or AV that can't actually be removed and blocks other AV from being installed later causing even more problems. Another problem I have seen is system settings not being restored leaving users with no zip or unzip capacity, for example (the option is just gone.) Lots of things that often are not found until much later.
Imaging is fast, easy and reliable.
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I have a couple of machine to setup this week - I might time both approaches and see which is quicker and most hassle free.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I have a couple of machine to setup this week - I might time both approaches and see which is quicker and most hassle free.
Of course if you can use an image to deploy the machines you'll save a ton of time. Create the first machine get all the windows updates on it (don't join it to a domain) then sysprep it, take an image, deploy to machine2, etc.. Even if you only install Office, often deploying an image takes less time than installing Office alone.
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@Dashrender said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I have a couple of machine to setup this week - I might time both approaches and see which is quicker and most hassle free.
Of course if you can use an image to deploy the machines you'll save a ton of time. Create the first machine get all the windows updates on it (don't join it to a domain) then sysprep it, take an image, deploy to machine2, etc.. Even if you only install Office, often deploying an image takes less time than installing Office alone.
I was going to recommend this but you got to it before me. At my old location we would purchase 100 desktops at a time (a school) they always came with Dell's crapware installed. Spending the two hours to setup a good image and then deploying it with FOG saved me days of work. I could image an entire lab, 40-50 computers, in ~30 minutes if I had a good image already.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I have a couple of machine to setup this week - I might time both approaches and see which is quicker and most hassle free.
Are they the same machines? Do you have imaging rights?
Often just putting Windows installer onto a USB key is ideal. Once you take the few minutes to do that, installs are super fast and take little interaction. That's the best (that I've seen) for doing one off installs.
If you have imaging rights it takes more time to prep BUT you can automatically blast out builds and rebuilds anytime that you want. It's worth the investment.
What's really nice is that uninstalling apps is a "do it every time" activity. But imaging or having the USB key ready is a "prep it once, use it over and over" activity so when you need to do rebuilds of the machines down the road, you are all prepared for it.
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@Dashrender said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I have a couple of machine to setup this week - I might time both approaches and see which is quicker and most hassle free.
Of course if you can use an image to deploy the machines you'll save a ton of time. Create the first machine get all the windows updates on it (don't join it to a domain) then sysprep it, take an image, deploy to machine2, etc.. Even if you only install Office, often deploying an image takes less time than installing Office alone.
Yeah, adding packages, customizations and whatever to a base image makes that process even more valuable as you can get a lot of other work done as a part of the process "for free."
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@coliver said:
I could image an entire lab, 40-50 computers, in ~30 minutes if I had a good image already.
That is impressive. What do you store the image on? I will definitely check out FOG.
I don't buy PCs in bulk. The most I would ever get is around ten at a time, so imaging isn't worth it for me. I can setup around five an hour, so at most I'm spending a couple of hours or so at a time.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@coliver said:
I could image an entire lab, 40-50 computers, in ~30 minutes if I had a good image already.
That is impressive. What do you store the image on? I will definitely check out FOG.
I don't buy PCs in bulk. The most I would ever get is around ten at a time, so imaging isn't worth it for me. I can setup around five an hour, so at most I'm spending a couple of hours or so at a time.
It was hosted on a VNXe 3300 NAS, but FOG supports multicasting so it was only sending the image out once.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@coliver said:
I could image an entire lab, 40-50 computers, in ~30 minutes if I had a good image already.
That is impressive. What do you store the image on? I will definitely check out FOG.
I don't buy PCs in bulk. The most I would ever get is around ten at a time, so imaging isn't worth it for me. I can setup around five an hour, so at most I'm spending a couple of hours or so at a time.
Unless those 10 devices each need to be setup differently - totally different software packages, imaging is still totally worth it. You spend 1 hour setting up the golden machine, take an image to a NAS or fileshare with Clonezilla, then blast it back to each of the other 9.
If you don't have WSUS you'd be spending 9x more bandwidth downloading updates alone.
By imaging you know all 10 machines are identical except when you provide the computer names during the mini post SYSPREP setup.I'd argue that it's worth imaging if you have only two identical machines you are setting up.
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@Dashrender said:
Unless those 10 devices each need to be setup differently - totally different software packages, imaging is still totally worth it. You spend 1 hour setting up the golden machine, take an image to a NAS or fileshare with Clonezilla, then blast it back to each of the other 9.
I did employ my MSP to do that last year. It took him days. Part of the problem was it was trying to transfer that image over a single cable to ten different PCs. That's about 300GB data I'd guess? He was just sitting there all day whilst I was paying him $100+ an hour. I sacked him and did the next ten my way in around 2 hours - of course, I was working my butt off during those two hours, but I got it done fast.
Of course he may just have been an idiot.
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He was clearly doing something wrong!
300 GB what the heck do you have to install? My normal installs are around 30 GB, they take around 13 mins to copy over gig-e (or less).
Try the process once yourself - during which if you have questions, please ask - if you find it still doesn't suit you, fine keep doing it the way you have been.
If you don't like it, you've learned a process to avoid, if you like it - you've learned a skill that should save you tons of time.
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@Dashrender said:
He was clearly doing something wrong!
300 GB what the heck do you have to install? My normal installs are around 30 GB, they take around 13 mins to copy over gig-e (or less).
Try the process once yourself - during which if you have questions, please ask - if you find it still doesn't suit you, fine keep doing it the way you have been.
If you don't like it, you've learned a process to avoid, if you like it - you've learned a skill that should save you tons of time.
He didn't have multicast setup so a 30GB image would become 300GB over the entire process. Not sure what tool he was using, if your switches don't support multicast FOG had an option to only do 2-3 at a time and queue the rest of them. Worked very well. It can take a significant amount of additional time but overall still better then doing it by hand. If you can't tell I loved using FOG took a bit of time to setup and configure exactly for our network but after that everything was awesome... although to be fair they migrated to Dell KACE after I left.
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OK true on the 300 GB total, but still I can do 5 machines at a time with Clonezilla in under 20 mins, so assuming I have a 1 GB switch 6 ports (one for NAS/server, the rest for PCs) other than building the image and taking the original image, you should be able to roll out the new machines in about 1 hour.
Also, depending how often you are deploying 10 computers at once, it's completely reasonable that you could reuse an image from one machine on another. Even if you have to update a driver here or there, then take a new image, you've saved yourself all the time of starting that image from scratch.
