I ahve posted several questions on another forum with no replies, so I am copying and pasting them here with hopes that someone may help.. so excuse the format as it may come off a bit "odd" with the addressing.. Preload? Hey guys, I have a question. I used to work for an outfit that did mostly retail, warranty support, and residential support for computers. When working the PC build department, we used what they referred to as a "preload". Basically, today, at my new company, we have a lot of clients (small business’s) that have a wide arrangement of hardware on site, nothing standardized. I was thinking back about this preload software and was wondering if anyone knew of a solution that would allow me to say.. Create a basic image, go into this, add software packages (office, frontpage, client software....) and store this on the network at the clients site and use this in situations when the users need to reinstall but not being limited to what kind of hardware they are using, so yeah, I might have to go back and make some adjustments with drivers and all, but for the most part everything else be there, like LAN settings, apps and what not... any ideas guys? Any ideas of forums that might be better suited for a question like this? I use this site a lot for info and its been a great help, so I am hoping you guys might have a solutions for me here.. many thanks in advance! -Will Some more questions: I am looking for a utility that I have seen that allows you to take a freshly O/S installed PC, lets say... win2k, and take a snapshot of it, then install an application, and after it is installed, take another snapshot and create a "install package" that will push this app down just by double clicking it and not having to go through install wizard and set parameters... this of course only being software specific not having to worry about what kind of hardware platform is running. Like, take a W2K machine, snap it, install SP4, Office SP's, IE 6 updates, more software..take another snapshot, and have this nifty EXE file that includes SP4, Office SP's, blah blah, that I could use to deploy on new builds every time with different PC's and not have to go through 2 hours of app install time... The other thing I am looking for is a way to deploy an OS on a workstation from an image without having to worry about the hardware. So I could like, instead of going though the install wizard of Win2K, could just "ghost" this "image" onto a PC, boot it up, have it then detect all the hardware, possibly with network settings already in place, and then only have to deploy my apps with the hefty utility that I mentioned above...

yes, there are different vendors that offer image creating programs. I use ghost, which comes with norton utilities. I create a image of a hard drive, save the image to a cd(s) and then I am able to transfer the image to other computers. You really need to read up on how to make all this.