Advantage and Disadvantage of Unattended Installation and Imaging

[Sgt_Strider]

I know this is the unattended forum and some of the responses might be biased, but I've always been curious in the advantages and disadvantages of both methods. It sounds like imaging might be more convenient since I can tweak the computer to the way that I want it after I finish formatting my computer and then image it. I can just roll back to that tweaked setup as necessary and not worry about reformatting my computer that often.

However, it seems like doing an unattended installation gives me more flexibility, but it takes longer. What do you guys think about this?

[Arie]

If you make an image of a computer, you can't always restore it to a different computer due to it having different hardware. The advantage of an unattended installation is that it isn't simply an image which you restore, you really do a full setup, which means that it will work on all systems basically. As for configuring, both can be configured the same really. Restoring an image is faster, so if it's only for one machine, just make an image. For me, I prefer to have an unattended installation which works on basically all machines and besides that, it's also a bit of a sport to create an unattended installation disc which contains everything you want

[renthead]

I am actually in the middle of a project where my unattended disc will be used by my company (and got royally yelled at about putting the oem logo's in there). The advantage I find is that:

A. Any issues that may occur is less likely to occur on all machines because the settings may be different here or there

B. If you slipstream the drivers properly, you can pretty much install xp on any machine, and the drivers will work off the bad (very nice for those pesky network card drivers)

C. Sometimes, you just need to clean out the machine, and it makes it simple and, if done right, quick as @#%$@$#.

Anyone have anything else to add?

[gosh]

For consistancy, Microsoft recommend doing an unattended install with all your custom settings, then imaging. Microsoft actually does this for windows vista - vista is installed, customized, sysprep'ed, then imaged into install.wim.

-gosh

[dexter.inside]

For consistancy, Microsoft recommend doing an unattended install with all your custom settings, then imaging. Microsoft actually does this for windows vista - vista is installed, customized, sysprep'ed, then imaged into install.wim.

-gosh

and also has done this many times to the same installation, adding or rolling up file versions along the way. Without this it would have been impossible to make Vista the way it is now (imagine having to reinstall windows using the clasical installer 20-30 times for each build or file change) or to test it properly.