Hardware Independent Image with limited resources

Well you have two choices, do you want to compress the images or do you not? The more data you have---the bigger the image---it will take more time it is unavoidable. Even with Ghost, you can only push so many bytes down an I/O pipeline. But compression is what takes most of the time, it goes though that "Expanding" process, that is the uncompression taking place.

And you can control the level of compression used when packing images into WIM.

And you cannot sit there and tell me it will take 5 minutes for you to push a 10 GB image off a DVD onto a computer and be done. It is not going to happen.

logicearth said:

Well you have two choices, do you want to compress the images or do you not? The more data you have---the bigger the image---it will take more time it is unavoidable. Even with Ghost, you can only push so many bytes down an I/O pipeline. But compression is what takes most of the time, it goes though that "Expanding" process, that is the uncompression taking place.

And you can control the level of compression used when compiling images into WIM.

Thank you for all the information. I am always open to using a better method of installing, whatever is the fastest. We have hundreds of new machines to deploy each month, plus hundreds to re-image, (repair, hardware failure, crash, etc.), as well as OS refresh.

What are the typical sizes of the MS images?

Currently I have an image (Windows 7 Enterprise with Office 2010 Plus {complete install}, Adobe Reader, and some other required software), completely setup with all registry keys set, default profile setup, Local Admin profile setup and ready for the domain (not added to, just ready to be added).

It is about 7GB in size and takes about 4.34 to image a machine.

Am I able to get the same performance out of doing it MS’s way?