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By Root 1204 0

woods, Windows will run some tests on your computer to give it a performance rating, which, in theory, will tell you how well programs will run on your computer. You’ll sometimes see minimum performance ratings on the sides of game boxes, but even then, you’re more likely to need plain, old-fashioned minimum system requirements. This process can take anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes, so this is another one of those coffee-break moments in the installation process.

Once the performance test finishes, Vista boots up and you have 30 days to activate your new operating system.

Automating the Installation

As you can see, you may have to sit around for quite a while when installing Windows. Instead of having to sit there answering questions and typing in CD keys, wouldn’t it be nice just to boot up the machine and have the installation process finish without any intervention on your part—especially if you have 30 PCs that need to be ready to go tomorrow morning? Fortunately, Windows offers two good options for automating the installation process: scripted installations and disk cloning.

Scripting Windows 2000 and XP Installations with Setup Manager

For automating a Windows 2000 or XP install, Microsoft provides Setup Manager to help you create a text file—called an answer file—containing all of your answers to the installation questions. Windows doesn’t come with Setup Manager, but you can download it from the Microsoft Download Center (www.microsoft.com/downloads) as part of the Windows XP Service Pack 2 Deployment Tools. Setup Manager supports creating answer files for three types of setups: Unattended, Sysprep, and Remote Installation Services (Figure 14-28). The current version of the tool can create answer files for Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional, and Windows Server 2003 (Standard, Enterprise, or Web Edition); see Figure 14-29.

Figure 14-28 Setup Manager can create three types of answer files.

Figure 14-29 Setup Manager can create answer files for five versions of Windows.

Setup Manager can create an answer file to completely automate the process, or you can use it to set default options. You’ll almost always want to create an answer file that automates the entire process (Figure 14-30).

Figure 14-30 Setup Manager can create several kinds of answer files.

When running a scripted installation, you have to decide how to make the installation files themselves available to the PC. Although you can boot your new machine from an installation CD, you can save yourself a lot of CD swapping if you just put the installation files on a network share and install your OS over the network (Figure 14-31).

Figure 14-31 Choose where to store the installation files.

When you run Setup Manager, you get to answer all those pesky questions. As always, you will also have to “accept the terms of the License Agreement” (Figure 14-32) and specify the product key (Figure 14-33), but at least by scripting these steps you can do it once and get it over with.

Figure 14-32 Don’t forget to accept the license agreement.

Figure 14-33 Enter the product key.

Now it’s time to get to the good stuff, customizing your installation. Using the graphical interface, decide what configuration options you want to use: screen resolutions, network options, browser settings, regional settings, and so on. You can even add finishing touches to the installation, installing additional programs such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Reader by automatically running additional commands after the Windows installation finishes (Figure 14-34). You can also set programs to run once (Figure 14-35).

Figure 14-34 Running additional commands

Figure 14-35 Running a program once

Remember that computer names must be unique on the network. If you’re going to use the same answer files for multiple machines on the same network, you need to make sure that each machine gets its own unique name. You can either provide a list of names to use, or you can have the Setup program randomly generate names (Figure 14-36).

Figure