jus to say thanks for the help i have gotten so far! you guys are great!

now, i want to be able to have it so that all the apps i want to silently install on a fresh install of windows will run from 1 installer!

I know OEM's do it (did some work on a Sony Viao other day & that does it!)

reason i want to do this, is i work for an IT company & we roll out various new PCs thru our office, most of them not on a domain, so we cant use a RIS. Even tho the silent installs run ok, i jus want to streamline it a bit more!

TIA

Rich

I ran into the same issue a few years back when I was working at a small shop doing computer repairs and had to reformat about 10 pcs a week. With many long nights (often spent reading this forum) I ended up with the following.

1) A set of unattended OS disks, including every version I could get my hands (retail, oem, vlk, etc).

Each disk included the following:

- Latest service pack and many other update (IE, WMP) slipstreamed into it

- An unattended answers file setup using the "defaulthide" method so that I could still enter the proper product key

- Registry tweaks loaded @ T-12 via cmdlines.txt so that they apply to all users

2) I then created a separate disc that installed any additional hotfixes that were not slipstreamed into the OS discs, along with a number of additional applications that I would normally install on all machines (adobe players, java, a/v codecs, etc). All of these were installed via RunOnceEx. Everything was automated so that no user interaction was required.

I chose to go this route as apposed to bundling everything together on the OS discs so that I would only have to update 1 disc when new hotfixes or apps were released. The only time I had to update the OS discs was when a new service pack or other major update was released.

One day I hope to change the design of the disc and make it menu driven so that I can manually choose which apps I want to install however I have yet to find the time to do so.

If your still interested (I see this post is almost 2 months old) I'd be happy to zip together the batch files that I use so that you can see how it was done. PM me if your interested.