flynntargart

humm worst ever eh... I was installing a video card in my old computer at the house, and forgot to unplug it - I was being lazy and not totally unhooking it, but naturally I unplug it when I do that... usually... hey it's on old POS .. I accidentally kneed the case (it's an old HP) which caused the system to power up. And while that's not very good, it gets worse, I was also on the cell with my buddy, (at this point I should explain that I was laying under my desk, too lazy to completely disconnect the system and was holding the phone with my shoulder, while trying to cram my head and the card under the case to see the slot in the riser card) and when the system kicked I up jumped a little... and my cell antenna got eaten by the CPU fan and I lost a computer and a phone in the same stupid mistake...

I would also vote for a second option at nLite start up. Instead of right away picking an xp install to work on, it would be way cool if you could load nLite up on one of your other PCs and in the main menu click 'gather drivers' and be able to select either by folder or per driver (like you can now) all or some of the drivers on the system, then hit a 'package' button or something and have nLite spit out a cab file that you could put on a usb key and load via nLite's regular driver add page on the system you re building your image on. that would be great for those of us using nLite with more than one system, cause that way you know for sure you've got every drive that a system needs.

I have a small problem, and it's nothing I couldn't solve manually, but frankly, that sucks. I'm building an unattended for some of the random systems in the office that the general image I built can't be used with, and for clean installs of out of office use computers. I've installed driver pack after driver pack, and that has helped, but I was wondering if there is stand alone program that can collect drivers in a similar manner as nLite's ability to find all the drivers in a given folder, and then output a zip or a cab file that I can then use in nLite? Thx! B)

Thanks for the idea Jaus, I googled changing hard drives via upgrade and I found a few articles like this one: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xp.html They seem to suggest that you can transfer the entire drive, then reactivate, which is great (of course after imaging cause i'm thinking it's a little risky). I don't know how viable this is, but I'll post my results (I'm going to test it this weekend on one of my pc's) if anyone else has any input that would be wonderful.

Thanks for the reply! I was looking at the file transfer tool, and I think I might end up using it for a few systems. I would really like to find a program that could also transfer the programs installed on the system, if this is even possible under XP, along with registry information and most importantly the user accounts / information.

Hey guys, just a quick question here. I'm a new admin at a small office here at my campus, and we've got some new pc's on the way. Go end of the year money! Anyway, the new pc's will be replacing a few peoples computers, and those computers replace the older and so on. I need to get them set up for our office, the problem being that we do a lot of different things, and everyone needs something different on his/her computer, so a standard image isn't any more practical than setting each one up and spending hours configing it. And of course there is the matter of personal files and settings for each persons computer :S On top of that, everyone is really excited to get the new computers and I work in the office with the ‘higher-ups’ if you will, so thanks to office politics there is that added pressure. The last admin didn't have any kind of deployment... anything... setup, or at least didn't leave any documentation and we really don't have the resources for that anyway, on top of which, I'm a part time student, so time is a major issue. I've been searching and found a few things that I think will help, but more knowledge is better, I was hoping someone here could point me in the right direction of a tool or article to read that would help me streamline (and automate as much as possible) this transfer. Ideally something like the Mac OSX startup wizard would be wonderful (you know that little guy that asks you to plug in your old computer via fire wire then it copies all your programs and settings over to the new pc, god that thing is great) Thanks guys