Category Archives: Win7

Misc. Notes on Windows 7

Windows 7 Ultimate is consumer-grade and thus gets 5 instead of 10 year life cycle.
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid14_gci1515612,00.html?track=sy160

Making a better image:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/stephenrose/archive/2010/07/17/improving-your-image-sector-based-file-based-and-sysprep-what-makes-the-most-sense-part-1-terms-and-windows-tools-primer.aspx

Some notes of default user profile template:
If you set the ‘copyprofile’ option in your sysprep XML file, the settings from the ‘Administrator’ account get copied to the default profile. The problem is that you have to build your ‘master’ machine from that Administrator account, not the account you create when you first fired-up the machine. This put me back a few weeks when I started.

So here’s the procedure:
1. Install Windows (create user in the Out-of-Box Experience)
2. Once you’re in, -re enable- the ‘Administrator’ user and give it a password
3. Blow away the OOBE user you created
4. Build your box
5. Sysprep with ‘CopyProfile’

Kudos to Marc Doughty