gshaw

Hi all, ended up on here from Google after finding the excellent walkthrough guides on SCCM. We're moving up from SMS 2003 and I think I've got the XP side of things sorted, for our desktops it's easy enough as there's 4 main hardware types and we'll make a "gold" image for each and deploy. For laptops however it's a bit more "interesting"... Over the years we've ended up with a real mishmash of hardware, some Intel some AMD, some dual core some single core and so on. With 7 I understand it that the OS isn't as picky about HAL types during imaging now so in *theory* we should be able to take one image and chuck it out to all the laptops? I thought that SCCM could take the raw 7 OS install files (WIM?) and then modify the HAL as required then out the box would pick up the majority of the drivers. Any stragglers we find left over we could do via WMI queries and TS groups. However reading the guides it doesn't seem that straightforward... we still have to capture a reference machine? That whole process seems somewhat pointless to me if the target machine is completely different? Will we have to do a random reference machine (maybe in a VM?) then use that to deploy out? Will it handle the HAL and drivers correctly? I'm hoping that at the end of the process SCCM can chuck Office and other apps on et voila a few laptops ready to roll as we really don't want 1 image per hardware type in this case, hence thinking about using 7. Any info much appreciated