We ran into a few issues this past week while applying our Windows XP image to the new T400 laptops. When the computers were turned on, all the USB ports worked except one. And Windows kept complaining about a PCI driver not being installed, even though on the reference machine it worked fine. There were no yellow warning signs in device manager about devices missing drivers.
We traced the problem back to the BIOS. It seems that someone had made changes to the BIOS on the reference machine before it was handed off to me to create an image. They had disabled the Fingerprint reader without disabling the ‘Pre-Desktop Authentication’, and set the USB sleep mode to something different than the defaults. We now have to change the BIOS settings to match the reference machine on every laptop out of the box. Somewhat frustrating. We’re now two full days behind schedule.

Another issue that I personally had this week was related to the workstation component of the rollout. I was informed that the rollout schedule has been cut practically in half. That works… we just need to push a little more. Two days later I got another shocker… We had decided on the DC7800′s to be our standard workstation. After two weeks of testing the image created for the demo machine, the decision was made to change (the day before the new DC7800′s were to be coming in) to the DC7900′s, as DC7800′s were in short supply, and we’d get the $400 more DC7900′s for the same price. This means we need to create a brand new image for the 7900′s, literally days before they come in, as well as proceeding as close to deployment schedule as possible. I foresee a lot of problems stemming from lack of testing.

Tomorrow I’m off to school (it’s reading week). Someone made off with my school hard drive, so my Windows Server 2003 Administration coursework is all lost. I now have to recreate most of it, as it’s required for the second half of the semester.

On a positive note, the Windows Deployment Services server (my baby and setup) is performing quite well. We can freshly image computers from start to finish in about 45 minutes. I’m quite proud of my work to be honest. Even better, although I’m the only one familiar with creating/capturing images to it, and managing it, it was very easy for the others on the IT team to use it after a cursory reading of my documentation. A product is functioning the way it should when others can use it with a cursory reading of documentation.

Anyways, I’m off to sleep. Time for some mental relaxation.