Deployment

Having software consistently deployed across the fleet of computers is one of the key points that can be automated. If I have a choice (and it makes sense), I will always choose GPO over any other solution because it’s embedded into Active Directory thus not requiring installation, learning and maintenance of additional management tool. MSI – Software Installation One of the main advantages of MSI installers is that in 99% of cases you can just use the “Software Installation” option in GPO, and GPO will take care of the silent installation....

Today we are going to inject drivers into the Windows image with the help of built-in tools in Windows. What do you need? Just a few things: Any hardware to which you’d like drivers to be added to Reference computer with the hardware attached to it Drivers Windows image which is going to be deployed I think there’s not much to explain, so let’s analyse the actual process. What we are going to do?...

Drivers – that’s what makes a harmony between hardware and software. Appropriate drivers can make a huge difference between computer’s performance, stability and even temperature. Therefore it’s super important to make sure you’ve got up-to-date files included with your image or Windows installation. We are going to review PNPUTIL tool – the versatile tool for handling drivers within the Windows. Why do you need PNPUTIL? Yes, why bother with some command line tool (PNPUTIL is command line only) when there are dedicated installers and device manager?...

Sooner or later every company will come to the point when using standard Windows image is just not enough. Manual installation, fetching all updates or installing software etc. etc. takes time, and in IT, we really can use that time for something way more productive. ...