It’s been a couple of months since i’ve updated the blog, but here’s another go at keeping it more up to date ^^
As most know i’ve been working as an IT consultant in Brussels and it’s taking quite alot of my time, giving me little time to do other stuff, but anyway, let start with a small overview of what i want to talk about and then later i’ll add some more posts just based on those topics 
Windows XP Universal Image
Having a new job and all I’ve noticed that not all companies are ready to make the switch to windows 7 even if it’s planned for this year (believe me, you can’t run windows 7 on a pentium 4 with 256mb of ram …) So we basicly get to work with laptops, desktops that have the age of 4-7 years, meaning that many of the problems that we’re having is failing of HDD, system being slow etc. They deployed however recently a batch of new laptops, Core i5 laptops for citrix users.. yeah … anyway, for those laptops they made an sysprepped image they could use on their more recent models with multicore processors. While for the other devices we have to work with ghost images that been made in 2006-2008 or so. This led to the fact that i adjusted the image for my own comfort when having to reimage a broken single core laptop/desktop and it was actually alot of fun learning how to fidle with sysprep, driverpacks and everything else to make it become a nice universal image!
I’ll go further in detail in post later in the month probably so stay tuned
Messing with WDS (creating the perfect boot.wim)
As I said in my previous topic, they’ve created a “universal” sysprepped image for their dual core laptops, in their words, their WDS image. Of course it isn’t a WDS image if you don’t deploy it with WDS, then it’s just a plain sysprepped image that you dump on your system and be done with. Main reason why they don’t deploy it with WDS is because their newest laptops didn’t get any network-connection when booted with the WDS boot image, meaning that the right driver wasn’t present in that image. Apparently many tried to make it work but failed, which resulted in no deployement with their WDS server.
Having created some WinPE environments before I’ve looked into this when I had some spare time on my hands and created a nicely working boot and capture image for WDS, really isn’t much to it but you just need to know where to start and get the basic principles. More in details in a later post 
WinPE 3.0 for IT troubleshooting
With Windows 7 Microsoft released version 3.0 of their WinPE (Windows Preinstallation Environment), as of this day there’s even an update to version 3.1 which includes several new features that you can find here if you’re interested. Now the reason that I mention this is that this PE is the basic of a perfect rescue cd, in the time of Windows XP many IT-pro’s, geeks, etc. created a similar environment which was referred to as BartPE as that was and probably still is the best way to create a Windows XP based PE because of all the scripts and tools that could an can be integrated within this environment. With WinPE 3.0 you can create a PE which is based on Windows 7 and all it’s benifits that come with it.
You’ve got serveral ways to create such bootcd’s, from hardcore cmdline tags, powershell scripts and one of my favorites, WinBuilder which gives you an UI interface with loads of options and scripts to create that perfect rescue CD you always wanted. In combination with the cmdline tags I’ve created one of my own that fits my needs for any situation. In combination with the WDS article i’m planning to write at a later point I’ll shed some light on how I created this rescue CD
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