Deploying Windows 7 Part 1

This is the first in a series of posts relating to my recent adventures with deploying Windows 7.

With this first post I will introduce the overall environment I'm building with and building for.

There are a few things that are a bit special about this deployment. It’s not your typical corporate domain-joined limited user deal -

• The machines are not domain joined
• There is no 'back-door' management
• The users own the machine. Both fiscally and administratively

The machine owners get much the same experience as they would have buying a laptop at a retail store. They get prompted for all the same options - machine name, enable updates - everything. It's their machine.

All I'm doing is making the installation consistent regardless of the hardware platform (i.e. no crapware) and pre-installing the applications that are required for the owners work.

That said not much of the remaining technical details are affected by this change in Operating System ownership. The same scripts and bits are equally applicable to managed, domain-joined deployments.

The only difference is that I need to make the deployment more resilient. Many of the target machines don't have optical media and it’s still a work tool. It needs to be resilient to any of the bad, bad things that its owner may do to it and get them working again quickly.

To this end I've deployed the image with Windows RE included. WinRE is a recovery environment that is included in Windows Vista and Windows 7. It’s the same environment you boot into when you choose recovery on a Windows Vista or Windows 7 installation DVD. The difference here is that I've baked WinRE and a backup copy of the Windows installation image into the hard drive within a hidden partition.

With Windows RE suitably configured the user can totally mangle the installation of Windows in C:\WINDOWS. They can easily boot into Windows RE and then re-install a clean copy of Windows and all of their applications as they were when they first received their machine.

Before Windows RE does this reinstallation it moved all of the user data in C: into C:\WINDOWS.OLD\ so the user won’t lose any of their documents. Additionally in this particular deployment the user’s data will also be backed up to Live@EDU.

The next few posts in this series will cover off three broad topics-

1. My lab environment including VMware workstation, Windows Deployment Server and the Windows Automated Installation Toolkit
2. Building and capturing an image
3. Deploying an image that includes WindowsRE from Windows PE booted either from USB or WDS.

Stay tuned!

Dell Laptop diagnostic special key sequence

Interesting little tid-bit. I've had a lot of drama with my Dell Latitude E6500 throttling when it gets warm. This has largely been resolved by installing BIOS A19 and keeping the heat-sink clean.

A recent discovery I found on Dell's forums is the diagnostic key sequence -

Hold shift and fn whilst typing 1-5-3-2-4, release then press fn + R

This diagnostics screen will give you readouts and let you change some thermal settings.

When the mode is enabled your keyboard lights will do some funky things. To reset back to defaults you need to shutdown and restart.

Pretty neat, eh?

Playing with the Option GTM380 HSDPA card

Following on from my last post we now move to the other HSDPA card I bought. This is an Option GTM380. As I can tell its not OEM'd by anyone else like the HS2300/MC 8775 was. Option's web page was recently re-vamped and the IEMI for my card will now let me download the latest driver from Option.

You can also get the driver and software bundle from the Option AT&T support page here.

The interface is a fair bit more basic than the Sierra Watcher, but there is still all the things you need to get it working.

One thing that didn't work as I expected is that the "Autoconnect" option in the software doesnt seem to leave the card in the "Always On" state. You can go into the cards driver properties and change the Autoconnect and Auto re-connect variables to 1 which does the trick however the software client still tries to tear down the connection if you exit it. Luckily the auto-reconnect function in the driver brings the link back up.

This card has two antenna connections that are needed to support 7.2MBps, and if the weather is right you can get about 60% of that. Two antennas doesn't seem to buy much extra connectivity reliability over the MC 8775 card, however.

The one significant gripe I have with this card is its lack of compatibility with Windows, and specifically Windows 7. The card drivers fail to re-initialise after sleeping, which I would do regularly given that I commute with my laptop. The issue is covered and patched for Vista however I'm not running Vista anymore. I do hope that its fixed in later builds of 7 - I'm currently on 7077 x64.

Buying cheap MC 8775 HSPA/HSDPA/HSUPA cards on eBay

I recently bought a couple of cheap (~$120AUD, shipped) 3G cards on eBay. Both work fine however I thought that I'd post about my experiences and mention some tips for young players. I'll cover the first card, a Sierra Wireless MC8775, in this post. I've been running it for a couple of weeks now, when I have more experience with the new card I shall post about it.

I bought them to use in my new Dell E6500 laptop running Vista x64.

The first was a Sierra Wireless MC8775, however the device I received was a HP branded HS2300 unit. After trying lots of drivers, I ended up getting the slightly older HP drivers working. Searching on HP's site for HS2300 found suitable drivers, however the later ones didn't install properly for me, its possible that they are locked to HP hardware.

There are some drivers included with the Generic Watcher, too, but these only cover Sierra's own brand products.

You can download HP the driver that worked for me from here.

You then can get the Sierra Generic Watcher app from here.

If so inclined you can get later firmware using the link in this post. Ignore the Watcher and driver link, though.

The MC8775 is a HSDPA single antenna device so it only supports 3.6Mb/sec but it does get quite a good signal using either of the two antennas in the E6500, better than my iPhone on the train, for example.

You can configure the Watcher profile type to Autoconnect and to not turn off the radio on exit. This way the Internet connection is "always on". You would want to keep an eye on your ISP quota, though.

Overall I'm quite happy with Optus' coverage on my commute and based on my iPhone experience (which is also with Optus) the coverage should be pretty good out on the road as well.