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I have 700 laptops that need patching after being offline for an extended period, and need to be ready to go in a 3 day timespan start to finish. They are running windows 7.

We have SCCM 2012 as an option, though in previous large scale efforts it has had trouble with successful patching for so far unknown reasons.

Essentially I see two options and wanted to reach out to see if there's hardware or software solutions I'm not aware of.

We can install extra routers and simply plug in all laptops to the network and let SCCM do it's thing hopefully in a timely manner.

Or buy new hard drives and image them using a drive bay system, not sure if any exist larger than 10 drives at a time. Then we would have to open each laptop and swap hard drives.

What say you all?

FaultyJuggler
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    `1.` Can you give us more specific details? When you say they need to be patched do you mean updating Windows only or do applications need to be updated as well? `2.` How do additional routers help you? I don't understand where they would fit in at all. If all of these laptops are connected to your corporate LAN then why would you need additional routers? – joeqwerty Aug 08 '14 at 03:16
  • If you're willing to buy drives to image, why not just image the drives in the laptops? – longneck Aug 08 '14 at 03:39
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    Gawd. It would be less labor intensive to run Windows Update _manually_ than to swap a hard drive. Just bring them all online and let them update. – Michael Hampton Aug 08 '14 at 03:45
  • They have been off the network and need updates and patches for security and compliance. My default is to just plug them in and let them dance with the GPOs but since we need to do nearly all 700 at once we will need additional hardware - I'm curious if there's a faster or better way than just buying extra large capacity routers (they do not currently have ports and will be used off site, essentially they're bringing brought in en masse for patching and need a quick turn around) – FaultyJuggler Aug 09 '14 at 03:55

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I do reimaging of laptops at work quite often.

It looks to me like that would be your best option. Using a harddrive connected over USB3 und a bootable USB stick it takes around 8-12 minutes to completely write an existing image to a laptops harddrive (my experience, at least). You can avoid buying additional switches and overloading your networks update server with this method, by using a few simple harddrives. There is software out there, that can access image files over network, so if you have a few switchports and some network storage available you can even avoid using USB harddrives at all.

But: you would have to think about activations. If you use MAK activation on windows, all your laptops will phone home on the first restart and try to reactivate their licenses, because the hardware identity has changed. This will probably fail, since Microsoft (understandably) assumes something fishy if you reactivate 700 licenses in one day. As for the other software you are using: better find out before starting.

If you cannot simply overwrite the whole of the systems: go for the network update option. You do not want to open up 700 laptops and exchange hardware. You really do not want to do that.

robert
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