OEM and Disk Imaging

osaddictosaddict London, UK
edited April 2009 in Science & Tech
I understand in a typical corporate environment when you have a volume licence for an OS you can tweak a PC and then make an image of it and roll it out on all new PCs - to configure them very quickly.

What options do you have if you don't have a volume licence, and instead buy machines say 2-3 at a time from Dell Business - and as such they have an OEM OS installed?

I suspect this creates quite a barrier to rolling out images in the usual way?

Comments

  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited April 2009
    You can roll out the image and then use a keyupdater to change the key after the fact as long as it's the correct versions of OS that you are rolling out across the machines.
  • osaddictosaddict London, UK
    edited April 2009
    kryyst wrote:
    You can roll out the image and then use a keyupdater to change the key after the fact as long as it's the correct versions of OS that you are rolling out across the machines.

    Ah ok, that's cool, definitely something I'll look into - I presume there's quite a few image making apps out there - which would you reccomend? - As I've not done it before something fairly easy to use would be good!

    Is the whole keyupdater thing all legit? - I remeber those things lurking around on moody copys of XP a few years back
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited April 2009
    We use Ghost to do our imaging, there's also acronis and other free versions. We just happen to have ghost and like it and does what we need it to do.

    As for the keyupdater the one I'm thinking of is legit. It's provided by microsoft. As long as the OS versions you are using are the same for the key's you are trying you shouldn't have any problems.

    Sometimes what will happen though is the keyupdater will change the key for you but then it will fail to activate. So what you can do is call into the 1-888 number and go through the prompts and it will activate it.
  • QCHQCH Ancient Guru Chicago Area - USA Icrontian
    edited April 2009
    Incorrect... Imagining of any sorts is not allowed according to Microsoft License agreements except for Corporate/ Enterprise VOLUME licenses.
    Reimaging is the copying of software onto multiple devices from one standard image. Reimaging rights are granted to all Microsoft® Volume Licensing customers. Under these rights, customers may reimage original equipment manufacturer (OEM) or full packaged product (FPP) licensed copies using media provided under their Volume Licensing agreement. However, certain conditions exist for using the Volume Licensing media for reimaging software that is previously installed either by the OEM or from FPP.
    Detailed document (Re-imaging Rights) from Microsoft...
  • GrayFoxGrayFox /dev/urandom Member
    edited April 2009
    Run sysprep on the machines, reseal.

    OOBE will run and have you make user accounts and enter a key. Then activate windows on each machine. (You can preactivate as well but you will have to google how)

    Then just use ghost to image them.

    Unless your company is going vlk its a real pain to do anything.
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