jmroberts70

Simply awesome free service. I managed to set the hole thing up in about 30 min. with little difficulty. The free version has ads on the site but they are just about the same ads as are here on this forum (not very intrusive). Pretty speedy and responsive site performance and oodles of custimizations available. Thanks a ton for the link!

Got it! Looks like I may have read bad info in the past. Here's Microsoft's own guide for it. This may turn out to be the easiest form of "unattended installation" ever! http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...;302577&sd=tech

So it IS using sysprep! I was told to check into that but after a bit it research it looked like I had to be running on a MS netowrk with Active Directory or something before it woud work. Was I missing something? Sounds like I was. I'll have to hit that back up and see what documentation is out there. Thanks a ton for the help so far!

As working as a PC tech over the years, I've seen installations of Win2K done without either a network or CD through "ghosting" --BUT WITH A TWIST: The ghosted image had the networking configuration, computer naming, account setup, and hardware detection removed. That meant that upon the first bootup, all was configured by us tech dudes. The nice thing was that all the required apps were installed beforehand, special setups were already in place, and the like. It went beyond just an unattended installation with an answer file. I'd kill to be able to know how they did this. I could then setup a single machine -with all the apps the way I like them, all the customizations I add for better perfornamce and then "repeat when needed" -no matter what the hardware platform is. Anyone have any idea how they did this? Is it just a matter of wiping parts of the registry or some configuration files? Thanx in advance.