General newbie questions - latest deployment tools?

[BleedingEdge]

Hi guys,

I tend to explain things in a long winded way, so for ease I have formatted my specific questions like this so anyone in a rush who kindly wants to help can get to the nub of my questions easily

I am the owner and general "tech" guy of a new theatre production company. In my IT capacity, I have to deploy XP (both x86 and x64) on numerous PCs within the company.

Could someone please tell me what the up to date deployment tools are for XP and XP x64? The deployment development is XP x64, running VMWare for testing purposes.

I'm assuming (please correct me if I'm wrong):

Automated Installation Kit (AIK) for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 [6001.18000.080118-1840-kb3aikl_en.iso]

This is detailed to work for Server 2003 (SP2) and XP (SP2), so I am guessing that XP x64 (SP2) and XP Pro SP3 will be fine.

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2008 Update 1

Is this the latest version of the "Deployment Tools" mentioned on the tutorials? This is dependent on varous other utilities:

- Windows Automated Installation Kit (Fine - see above)

- MSXML 6.0 (fine, but 6.0 SP1 is the latest release)

- Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0.2 (fine, but 5.5 is the latest)

- User State Migration Tool 3.0.1 (fine)

Now, with these, I am developing the deployments on an x64 machine, but for both x86 and x64 target systems. Do I need to download both x86 and x64 versions of these tools (where there are 2 available) and install them on my x64 development machine?

Add to this the obvious nLite and WMPSlipstreamer.

Am I missing anything else that people can think of? In terms of the *necessary* tools.

Many thanks,

Martin Hughes

Edited May 4, 2009 by BleedingEdge

[jaclaz]

I am the owner and general "tech" guy of a new theatre production company. In my IT capacity, I have to deploy XP (both x86 and x64) on numerous PCs within the company.

....

Add to this the obvious nLite and WMPSlipstreamer.

Am I missing anything else that people can think of?

Reading the nLite's License in the part where it allows only personal use?

jaclaz

[BleedingEdge]

Thanks jaclaz - I have to confess that I missed that completely...

Ah well, I suppose it will all have to be done the manual way (using the /integrate method) - my plan was to use nlite for hotfix/IE/WMP integration only (thus my need for the other deployment tools).

Thanks for pointing that out!

Martin