Hey guys, just a quick question here.

I'm a new admin at a small office here at my campus, and we've got some new pc's on the way. Go end of the year money!

Anyway, the new pc's will be replacing a few peoples computers, and those computers replace the older and so on.

I need to get them set up for our office, the problem being that we do a lot of different things, and everyone needs something different on his/her computer, so a standard image isn't any more practical than setting each one up and spending hours configing it. And of course there is the matter of personal files and settings for each persons computer :S On top of that, everyone is really excited to get the new computers and I work in the office with the ‘higher-ups’ if you will, so thanks to office politics there is that added pressure. The last admin didn't have any kind of deployment... anything... setup, or at least didn't leave any documentation and we really don't have the resources for that anyway, on top of which, I'm a part time student, so time is a major issue.

I've been searching and found a few things that I think will help, but more knowledge is better, I was hoping someone here could point me in the right direction of a tool or article to read that would help me streamline (and automate as much as possible) this transfer. Ideally something like the Mac OSX startup wizard would be wonderful (you know that little guy that asks you to plug in your old computer via fire wire then it copies all your programs and settings over to the new pc, god that thing is great)

Thanks guys

The manual way, very easy:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechn...y/mgrtfset.mspx

The more automated way, not as easy, but quite powerful:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/s...november19.mspx

Thanks for the reply!

I was looking at the file transfer tool, and I think I might end up using it for a few systems.

I would really like to find a program that could also transfer the programs installed on the system, if this is even possible under XP, along with registry information and most importantly the user accounts / information.

This might not be possable, but its just an idea anyways.

Make an image of the old hard drives. copy then to the new drives. do an 'upgrade' to XP~ all settings and apps transfered.

would be time consumeing, but it would work.

Thanks for the idea Jaus, I googled changing hard drives via upgrade and I found a few articles like this one: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xp.html

They seem to suggest that you can transfer the entire drive, then reactivate, which is great (of course after imaging cause i'm thinking it's a little risky).

I don't know how viable this is, but I'll post my results (I'm going to test it this weekend on one of my pc's) if anyone else has any input that would be wonderful.