All,
I have just finished the initial phase for provisioning a laptop with Windows XP. I am using LANDesk Management Suite which includes provisioning for this. Provisioning is a way of building templates that execute instructions on a client machine. I have setup my template to currently format a machine to the NTFS partition, Copy device drivers, install Windows XP SP2, configure devices, join network domain, and then install the LANDesk agent. My next phase is to now customize the install of XP.
In the past I manually applied applied lots of tweaks before taking an image with Ghost or LANDesk's imaging utility. I am now searching for a utility to help build these tweaks into a script. I have used Microsoft's Sysprep or SetupMgr.exe to deal with the pre-installation of Windows but I have not found a utility that will allow me to save a configuration file for applying tweaks. Some of the tweaks I would like to apply are listed below. If you have any insight into this matter your help will be greatly appreciated.
A Few Examples Of Tweaks That I Would Like To Script:
Turn Off Firewall, Change Folder View Settings, Remove Language Bar from Desktop, Classic Start Menu, Windows Classic Theme, Windows Explorer and drop in Main Programs List, Remove Extraneous Items From Start Menu, Turn off Auto-Run for All Drives, Turn Off Hard Drive Indexing, Set C:\ Drive Permissions, Turn Off System Restore, etc.
I am also familiar GPO but I didn't want to go that route. I have also briefly glanced through GPedit.msc but I am not sure if I can import/export settings.
Any thoughts or insight would be appreciated. I can't be the only user who has tried to do this.
:)