imaging / refreshing laptops

[Andyb]

Hello,

 

Looking for a little advice about how other companies re-image / refresh / reset laptops and computers between hires or productions.

 

Recommendations of processes and applications would be welcome. Solutions for mac and pc's alike would be good too. Looking for efficient solutions for half a dozen machines.

 

As well as hearing about software solutions, concerns and issues I'm keen to resolve or identify as not being a problem include;

 

• 
   
  
• duplication of software product keys if image from one machine is used on X number or other identical machines. All machines have individual licence keys rather than a single enterprise licence key.
  
• how regularly the image needs updating. Applying updates released post the creation of an image file.
  

 

I look forward to hearing how others do it.

Many thanks

Andrew

[smalljoshua]

We use Deep Freeze

 

Josh

[mac.calder]

With our rental stock, we use LanDesk for image distribution and use the manufacturers recovery software to restore the images. Basically push image, license, activate, then create a new local recovery image on each laptop. We do 6-monthly updates to our system images and restore all laptops from the on-board image at the conclusion of each show.

 

Each laptop probably requires 5 minutes of manual intervention each over the course of a day when we do a new image dump.