Quality Control Post Installation Checklist

[poozler]

How do you know that an installation of XP is good?

I am using sysprepped images to deploy XP Pro to over 1500 computers this summer.

How do you test the master computer before running sysprep and making the master image?

How do you test a computer that has been deployed using that image?

I have a checklist (just shortcuts to remind me) on the desktop of the deployed computers that manually runs through some steps like defragmenting and opening Windows Media Player; creating a Word doc, running activation etc.

All the computers I'm imaging must be activated. They are using retail version of XP Pro and Office 2003 Standard.

I've used sysprepped images to deploy XP for more than a few hundred computers over the last two years yet I still have incidents where the deployed image looks good and activates but then someone will discover a quirk; the most recent one was that the icons in System Tools on the Start menu are all corrupt and don't work.

When this happens the image gets deleted and I'll rebuild the image from square one.

The other thing that makes me want to improve the way I test is I had an image recently that for some reason the activation timer was not reset.

Everything looked good and then I notice that the thirty day countdown to activate on the deployed systems were counting down from the time left on the Master image.

So basically I'd like to hear what others do to ensure they have correctly deployed their systems.

Oh yeah another thing I just remembered .... the SP3 version of sysprep.exe has anyone out there had any issues using it?

I did not realize until a few weeks ago that an SP3 version even existed...

Thanks!

P.S.

A special thank you to Microsoft the creator of Windows XP; without you and your fine software I would not have a job.