Our company is doing a "total IT makeover" and is using GSS 2.5 for the first time. We have 30 new Dell computers, (two models) OEM XP Pro licenses and OEM Office 2007 SBE licenses. I would like to build the perfect machine (1 for each model type) with all software, updates, drivers, patches etc installed, sys prep it and create a ghost image to be stored on our deployment server. My hope would then be to ghostcast all machines with the updated image and have a script (or any other "unattended" option which you might recommend) change the OEM license key to the one associated with the BIOS, OEM Office key, update the computer name, (by reading from a txt file or other..) join the domain, and then work correctly afterwards! :) I am writing to ask those who know Ghost well if they would share (in as much detail as possible) how they would go about deploying this sort of image. (OEM XP Pro and OEM Office) Is there a best practice for prepping new OEM computers and structuring image restores if and when necessary during the lifetime of the system without having to visit the workstation? Many thanks in advance.......

Then your place to start is at the Microsoft site. See technet and the server areas. The other choices are the server books or schools. Every cert question is in the MS books and the technet site. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10