My machines slowed down

[Allan]

[DaveLembke]

Thanks for sharing this free open source FOG imaging solution Cameron. I wasnt aware of this.

Currently I have been installing an additional hard drive into each computer and using that as a master system image for each build and then cloning that to the drive to be used, then disconnecting the master drive and letting it run on the working drive when done until the working drive gets fouled up, and then reclone the work drive with macrium reflect from the master drive.

Years ago I use to use Ghost 2003 to have one computer as the image master server only powered on when needing to image systems, and I took the bootable 1.44MB custom floppy disk that you can customize to static IP as part of the Ghost 2003 features, and used Roxio CD Creator to move the image of the 1.44MB floppy disk to a CD. Then with bootable CD, it was set to boot from CD acting like a read-only floppy drive and mounts the NDIS2 network driver for Intel Pro 100 NIC and assigns static IP to 130.0.0.2 and Ghost 2003 runs in which I can tell it to run as a slave. From the master system I have the IP set to 130.0.0.1 and can connect to that slave and select image to push to that system over the network. *I bought a bunch of Intel Pro 100 NICs off ebay to install into all systems to have the same network adapter to support imaging without custom CD's for each network driver which would be a pain.

This required a image created for each system that is to be supported for imaging to avoid systems being imaged with same key in use on multiple systems of the same make/model. I stopped using this when I moved away from XP to 7 as the main OS for most systems and Ghost 2003 doesnt play well with Win 7.

Thinking the FOG might also need custom image files saved for each system to avoid pushing out multiple systems with the same Windows key.

Use to use PXE with RIS Server years ago and so PXE boot is sweet for imaging not needing to use bootable media to start the process.

After I mess with my one troubled system I am going to tinker with this FOG project. Thanks for sharing this. 

[camerongray]

As far as Windows keys go with Fog, it has functionality to install the product key on a per machine basis from a common image.  However, I've never had to use this, with Windows 8.1 the keys are stored in the UEFI so cloning the machine means that it just picks up the key and activates automatically. It also seems to work fine when Windows 7 is activated against the SLIC table in an OEM machine's BIOS (in my case from using the Dell recovery media instead of a regular Windows install DVD which uses the product key from the COA)