After lots of swearing at people whose fault it probably wasn’t the Desktop PC epic fail was sent back.



The laptop came with a windows image pre-installed, which I didn’t want – but out of interest I thought I would check the computer anyway and see what was installed.  I turned it on and was rather swiftly greeted with a blue screen of death saying IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL which is the computers way of saying that some driver has written somewhere it shouldn’t and it has protected itself.  never mind, we don’t need this image anyway.



On to the laptop.  This one went easy, it would boot from CD and within 5 minutes my image was up and running.  So I logged in and all was well.  Except it wasn’t.  It greeted me with a driver error, which is odd because I hadn’t installed anything yet.  Reboot and all is well, there were 9 unknown devices, so I connected it to windows update and it installed most of them, rebooted about 4 times.  All is well.



Ran our software and it couldn’t...

 

I have spent the last 4 days trying to build an image suitable for our Approved Workstation.  I built an image, I resealed it and deployed the reseaaled image on a VMware machine and a real machine that was very old.  Both of which worked.  I was amazed that MSDN were actually correct and it was actually hardware independent.



Then the actual PC’s arrived at long last from our mother company.  Then the disasters ensued…



We ordered two types of machine, a desktop workstation and a notebook version, the idea being that each type would bring choice to the customer.  Having done this type of deployment before I carefully asked fro TWO examples of each, the 1st would be for building the custom image and the 2nd would be for testing the deployed image would actually work on a physically separate machine.  I asked for this because I have wasted many days in the past with error caused by machines that don’t exactly match.  We were told we could only have one, and I agreed to this...