Windows 7: Windows 7 Installation - Transfer to a New Computer

Very excellent tutorial.

To be honest I just knew this after I read your topic. =x Shame on me.

Thank you Kari for your long answer.

I just found Method Three in your tutorial.



I think - though I am no deep knowledge Microsoft expert - I am beginning
to understand your method and I should have known it before I started my own
trial and error method.

Thank you for another great tutorial of this forum !

No problem. I'm still experimenting myself, learning as I go. The idea behind this tutorial was to take some of these wonderful Windows features usually only known and used by pros in corporate network systems and adapt them to benefit normal users, without being too technical.

Of course, doing this really as it should be done we would take WAIK to create WinPE to be able to build hardware independent images for deployment. But first normal users would already stop reading after they found those words WAIK and WinPE. The methods described in tutorial do the thing, and in one or two PC's home network it's all that's needed.

I am already writing the second part to this tutorial, for more advanced users. Give me a few days

Kari

Looking forward to the tutorial v2.

Thanks for putting in the work on this topic.

Very nice tuturial. Helps with tards like me who decide to install 7 on a partition that you didn't mean to install on. Yeah, would've helped if I would have realized this BEFORE I installed all the software and updates.

A great way to introduce consumers to SysPrep here.

I hope everyone who uses this tutorial will rep Kari above for such a valuable contribution:

+1

Thanks, Greg. Coming from a valued senior member and an MVP, your words really made me smile!

I happened to stumble upon this way of using sysprep almost accidentally, when sysprepping a newly installed system to be imaged and transferred to two other computers on my small home network. I then realized that because the things sysprep does, it must be possible to use it also when changing hardware, to let Windows "forget" current hardware setup and start from beginning.

It's just a practical example of that we quite often can use development, deployment and other tools also for quite simple tasks.

Kari

This is mostly used by Manufacturers like Dell or HP. I remembered while working with Dell, when our customer's used to turn on their new PCs for the 1st time, they could have all softwares pre installed and it would just run like the images shown in the above tutorial.

Great info Kari. Now we can build our own custom PCs and can sell it to customers. Lets make a new PC company.

Is there a way to SysPrep an image itself, other than Acronis 10+ with Universal Restore?

The steps given here show how to create an image from a Sysprepped HD. Can it be run on a mounted image instead?