What's the best way to deploy a large number of PC's?

Question

I need to know the "better" way for doing PC's deployment, the PC's will be running Windows Vista and 7 and need to clone a lot of this particular configuration. My first thought was, doing a general configuration of a PC (one for Vista x86, other x64, other one Windows 7 x86 and finally a Windows 7 x64), doing a sysprep and clone it.

Using these images over and over again, I need to install many software in every PC, (different in each PC, from list of 20 programs or so) and configure their profiles; enable administrator account, etc. Is there a way doing it easier? I'm stuck with this process, it's very slow and I think there should be a better way of doing it, apologize for my English, and many thanks for any help.

P.S.: Is there anyway of not losing all the user configuration of the local administrator account while doing sysprep?

Answer 1

Cloning with multicast. I deploy 25 PC's at a time in each of a dozen rooms.
A 35gb image deployed to 25 pc's in 15 minutes total. Using gigabit of course.

Are you setting values in the unattended.xml file?

I use drbl.sourceforge.net

If you want to pay lots of money SCCM.

Answer 2

If you have a license for Windows Server 2008 you can deploy with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. I have been able to configure a deployment environment with domain join, auto install packages and applications like Office. This took me less than 2 days.

If you already have .WIM files of sys-prepped machines you can import them into the Toolkit.

Also, with the toolkit you can create USB drives which either connect to the server itself or have the image self contained so you can hand out the USB drives to other techs or users so they image their own boxes or laptops.