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[Mr ChriZ]

I know a number of people here use Acronis for imaging machines.
Does anyone have much experience with cloning machines?

I currently have a seed machine which we need to clone at least 100 times but it could be nearer 1000!
We were going to get Dell to do this for us, but suddenly their pricing's gone skew and it now may make far more sense for us to buy the machines off the shelf from them, and then image them our selves than buy them through our account despite the fact we've worked our way up to being classed a gold customer....

Quick questions, how long would it take to clone say a drive with approximately 40GB of data?

Does Acronis resolve the MS Licensing issues?  Each new Dell machine would arrive with a new Vista License Key, however the machines will be cloned from the original seed.

Is it possible to get away with hardware changes at all?
For example if Dell decided to suddenly change the motherboard, and processor of the model of machine we go for would we have to rebuild the image?
How about if it was still the same family of processor?
Hard Disk?

Any information gladly received!

[Daydream]

From the top of my head. Made a full setup install with everything on one machine. Bought a Symantec Ghost Solution Suite (or whatever is called; check licensing). Installed the PCs everywhere and hooked them to the network; or sometimes just piled them somewhere where we brought a switch (or more) and hook 'em to the network. Made sure their primary boot option is the network. Setup a GhostCast Server to feed the image. Reboot all the machines. Pushed a button on the server. Watched in amazement.

The difficult part starts after. Because pretty much you end up with the same PC on 100+ stations. Bringing them over into a domain it's a different kind of art. There are some scripts to do that but it's never fast.

Maybe others tried something better.

[Mr ChriZ]

These machines are all going to be adopted by different owners so the domain side of things is not an issue.
That's interesting that it works across the network.  Thanks for the info!

[Mr ChriZ]

We've got quite into this now, imaging and configuring around 4 machines a day.  We're currently using Ghost, but we're going to move away from it as soon as possible due to licensing costs.  Last week we moved from Optiplex's to Latitudes without to much difficulty.

The most time consuming thing is actually updating the images.  We also have problems with SysPrep.  Vista has some in built counter which apparently locks you out if you sysprep more than 3 times with the generalise command.  So far we've not had the time to test this theory as we're continuously moving and are very short staffed!
However it could cause us problems if we try and change machines again.