mcurrie111

Hi..I'm a support engineer for a software company, and have mainly been working with XP and Win2K3. I regularly make images of completed PC's and servers, that I can just restore on the next machine. We now want to do the same with Vista machines, but when I build a machine with all our custom software installed, then make the image, its over 20GB big!!!! When I have a look at the details of the image, its the Vista files that are big. When I do and XP or Win2K3 image, it squeezes it down to between 2GB and 4GB, sometimes bigger, depending on the client requirements. What I would Like to do is get the Vista image to fit onto a DVD. Please help, any info would be greatly appreciated.

Hi...Will have a look at these, and see if they can do what I'm hoping to do. One of my senior engineers, may have come up with a solution, but not as simple as what we really would like. Thanks for the prompt responses. I'll report on any progress we've made.

Hi... I work for a solutions company, and I'm trying to make my life, as an engineer, a bit easier. I have made a bootable ISO image of Windows XP, with a whole bunch of customizations done, and some custom software, our company makes, installed. Its just at the moment, everytime a change needs to be made, I have to make the change, recreate the image, burn it to disc, then load it onto a new machine to be sent to a client, all done nicely for them, to plug and play. This is instead of building Xp PC's everyday from scratch. What I'm looking for is a way to put the ISO image on a bootable USB key, so that I can make changes easily, without having to make unneccessary copies over and over again. Pull out a new PC, plug in the USB key, turn on the PC, let it boot off the USB key and a while later, bob's your uncle, a fully setup XP machine ready to go out the door. Has anybody done this, or know how to? Please let me know how, or point me in the right direction. Thanks. mcurrie111