Bezalel

Under their new business model, instead of making money by selling the OS, they will now make money by selling apps. Without a MS account, the store won't work. With the VL versions they still will be making money off the OS itself.

What brand is this for?

When I have multiple drivers with the same ID I let Windows determine which is the best driver to install. I don't touch the INF's in order not to invalidate the WHQL certificates.

I think some of your procedures are overcomplicated, here are some of the thing I do to solve the same problems. On my network I created an AD account that can join a computer to the domain but can't do much else. I don't care what model I'm installing to because I have INF files for every device in my organization (some of them were extremely difficult to extract from packaged installers). For user profiles I use roaming profiles. I set the policy for WSUS from cmdlines.txt.

Just use the Win32_WindowsProductActivation WMI Class.

The easiest method is to install Windows on a simular motherboard and to transfer the HD to the powervault when finished. as long as the motherboard uses the same HAL and mass storage driver you should be OK, all of the devices on the PowerVault 715N have their drivers build in to 2003 (I never tried XP). If you want to do it the hard way take a look at http://en.community.dell.com/forums/p/17729873/17889070.aspx.

It would also help to modify the Installation Sources value in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup. That way you won't have to tell Windows where the files are every time you need them.

What is running is called "Mini-Setup". Windows has already been completely installed and it is only showing enough of the screens from setup to personalize the PC.

You shouldn't be using any key in sysprep. The end user should be entering the key from the Refurbisher COA.

You will need use the System Builder Bypass Tool. If you are registered as a System Builder you can get the tool and more information at http://oem.microsoft.com/script/contentpag...x?pageid=561187.

That image was created for distribution shares where $OEM$ should be in i386. when using a bootable CD $OEM$ should be in the root of the CD.

HP does weird things with their recovery sets. The best option is to run mgadiag and post the report and the CRC32 of your OEMBIOS.CAT.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto Update] "ScheduledInstallTime"=dword:00000012

I don't see any reason it wouldn't work but it might be getting messed up due to your regional settings. Try changing the settings to EN-US.

The sets are interchangable between x86 and x64. A generic x64 key can be found in the MS article titled "Preserving OEM Pre-Activation when Re-installing Windows XP"

Google is your friend.

Here is the relevant quote for the SLP Whitepaper:

I never heard of Tiny PC but there was a Tiny Computers. They went out of business and were taken over by Time Computers. both of these brands are listed in kutslist (but I don't have either of these sets). What does the COA say?

It depends how you are starting the setup. If you are starting the setup by booting from the CD the $OEM$ folder should be in the root of the CD. If you start setup by running winnt32 then the $OEM$ folder should be in I386.

The free license only applies if you have a high quality fake.

In the United States all the Desktop Volume Licenses are Upgrades but the media doesn't check for compliance. I'm not sure about the media distributed in other countries.

All that does is copy all instances of table type 1 from the host's SMBIOS tables to the guest's SMBIOS tables. SLP does not nessasarily depend on the SMBIOS tables.

There is a newer HP set (D107C3EA) but I'm not sure why. Dell uses different ranges for 2003 but I haven't had any problems installing on any of their desktops.

None of the XP filesets will work for 2003. So far I have Dell HP/Q IBM and NEC.

It seems to use the same method as 2003 but I don't have a SLP key yet to determine if the 2003 filesets are compatible with WHS.