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Bill H

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Upgrade to Win7 100 machines

I have to upgrade 100 workstations for an unaffliated company from winxp to windows 7. What would be the fastest way to achieve this? Can i use sysprep and WDS? Silent install? I havnet heard the detials as far as if they are all the same types of machines and if i have to backup any data
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piji
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I think the best way will be WDS which you can use it for later on. If all the workstations are the same then you don't need to have more images.

Then only thing will be backup data or may settings from XP workstations. Which will be time consuming? If they are part of domain may ask all the users save all their data on server or redirect “My documents” and “Desktop to some sort of servers.

Other option will be Norton ghost. So you can setup one machine and then ghost it to all the rest of hard disks.

1. There is no way to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7, all Windows XP to Windows 7 can only do the new installation, that's a problem.
2. Your 100 machines maybe are various hardware configurations, sysprep and WDS better using on the same hardware configuration.  Hope they are.
3. If you need backup data for those 100 machines, that's another big problem. it depend on what data on XP you want to backup. Windows XP without a good backup tool.
---------------- 3rd party tool ----------------
4. I usually using the Acronis backup tool to backup data, you can consider it .
5.  If your Windows 7 CD key are the same,  you can install Windows 7 on one of 100 PCs, Then backup the Windows 7 of the PC to a network place or USB disk as an image file by Acronis echo enterprise backup/restore tool,  then you can restore the image to other 99 PCs, then complete the 100 PCs installation.  If the 100 PC with different hardware configurations, The tool has a item called  "universal restore" can be choose, it can help to restore the system to a PC with different hardware configuration.
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Bill H

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It may be Win Vista to Win 7
Have you looked into MDT2010?
It's extremely complex for beginners so may not be appropriate however it would suit the situation perfectly.

You can't technically upgrade from XP to Windows 7 however you can do a migration from XP to Win 7 using MDT.. It also resolve the issue of different hardware models as you can insert drivers by make/model or just have a massive pool of drivers and let the OS choose which one it wants to use.

The following guide is quite intense but worth a look.
http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Deploying-Windows-7-Part1.html
I have some more basic guides I can post if you're interested in looking more into MDT2010. I just implemented an imaging solution for my company using it and while it does take awhile to wrap your head around the amount of things you can do with it are fantastic.

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bbao
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I would recommend WDS, as has already been recommend ... using MultiCast, you can install all 100 machines at once.  Just keep in mind that you will be doing a clean install of Windows 7 on these machines, as there is no "upgrading" in-place from XP.
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PoweredgeTech, can you expand on how the multicast would work?

Andoss, i am highly interested in MDT, if you can post those guides that would be great.

Thanks guys.
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