Any interest on a Guide of creating a custom install.wim with everything u want preinstalled?

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kriztall

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Hey,
since i sometimes dont know what to do, i thought in case someone dont know or want to know how to create easily a fully custom install.wim as u like to have instead always install apps, tweaks, drivers and so on on every windows install. Of course with NTLite u can create Post-Setup with all those things, but what i mean is a Windows ISO where everything is already installed or whatever u always do after a clean install
It is very easy to do
Before i waste time i want to ask :)

greetz
 
Having all your drivers or apps pre-installed in the image is known as sysprepping. You complete a basic Windows install, and then load all the drivers and apps, before capturing the finished system as an install image.

The advantage is you skip over all the intermediate setup steps in the install, so the total deployment time is short. The disadvantage is you have to start over from scratch if you decide to change the list of pre-installed apps or drivers.

The question is which feature is most important to you? Large enterprises will use sysprep, because they install the exact same apps and never really change the configuration. The image is frozen, and quickly deployed to many systems. They don't create new images that often. If you want a large program like Office pre-loaded, this is the way to go.

A new PC ordered from Dell or HP is sysprepped. All you have to do is run OOBE to configure the user account and hostname.

Other users like to constantly update their software apps when building a new image. The sysprep adds more time to image preparation. If you want the image to work for other users (beside yourself) or install on multiple PC models, the image needs to be generalized before capture.
 
g-force said:
You might think about "audit-mode, install-software, sysprep, capture"?
Click to expand...
Yes thats exactly right, but i think most NTLite users does already known that, so i think its waste of time to write such a Guide, but i think still about it.
garlin Yea, the disadvantage u said is correct. But for that reason maybe atleast create such a custom image which u do on every Windows install always, even it is just apply tweaks, any settings u always change. Whatever i cant speak for everyone, in my case i have for example some things which i always need to do, like changing the default Taskmanager to the System Informer Taskmanager (better then SysInternals Process Explorer). So some autostart Apps which does never gets changed and those Apps i have anyway on another Partition which i dont format, so they are always up to date. Also the StartMenu, StartAllBack.
But u can also change/update the custom image of course. And it doesnt need to be just to one custom Image, two or more. Depends on the user.
 
An alternative is to use unattended installs. Most software has some form of it now.

The method I used when building W7 images was to create a set of msbuild makefiles. One for each package run as subtasks by a master file. This can be run during the audit phase or post install.

The task files are fully self-contained and be tested individually. They are also much, much easier to create and maintain than a single makefile or cmd script.

The method I used for developing and testing them was to create to create a VM with just the base install, manually is quicker in this instance, and the guest additions. Take a snapshot and revert to it after each test.
 
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