The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

Today has been an interesting day at work, with lots of things going wrong and one thing going right.

In the going wrong department, the image that I spent the last couple of days working on was completely useless because the base Windows XP was installed from an OEM copy of Windows XP and not a volume-license key version like we use here.  The machine had Vista on it originally but we have some legacy software (read: 3rd party really old programs from circa 1998 or so) that doesn’t like Vista so I had to drop back to XP.

Anyway, if you create an image using sysprep and include a volume license key it won’t work with an OEM copy because they are actually separate discs that won’t accept each other’s keys.  I really need a properly licensed Volume copy of XP for the base image so I had to re-image the machine with a generic image and start putting drivers and software back on again!

In the going right department at least I was able to use my Kbox to push out 4 of the software packages automatically to the machine saving me at least an hours worth of work!  The software packages that i’ve gotten setup for silent automated installations pushed out from the management appliance are Firefox 3, Project 2007, Visio 2007 and Acrobat Pro 8.0.  I’m hoping to get larger items such as MatLAB and LabView done eventually so that they can be completely automated as well.

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