I need to install Windows and loads of Apps on about 10 machines all with the same hardware. Whats the easiest and quickest way to do it?

I was thinking of installing everything on one PC then creating some sort of ghost image onto CDr then installing the image onto the other PC's. Is this possible?

Any other methods or general advice would be greatly appreciated.

No, Ghost would be your best option, Ghost on to a bootable Ghost-CDR , pop them in the next PC and so on...

The CorpEd has MultiCast where you can install the images over a network, but I dont think the price for that justify the need, so a personal copy will do nicely.

HTH

if you don't want to use/buy/steal any software you can always just, copy the partitions, depending on the OS your using. say win2k, you take your image drive and a blank drive to a working 2k system, copy all files from one sys to the other. should work fine, just change the name and so forth (delete all hardware and reinstall). if your on nt4.0 use ntsid (don't know if they've came out with an ntsid for 2k/xp or not) to change the sid of the system. if your on 98/me you'll have to sys the drive.

The Microsoft utility called sysprep.exe would do the job nicely for 2K and XP. It resets the SID, removes the hardware table, randomizes the computer name, etc. and makes it easy to image the harddrive to other systems.

Thanks for you advice. Think I'll go with Ghost as i like the idea of a bootable CD, might even be simple enough for the general support staff to manage ;)

Doesn't matter about the computers having different names etc as they aren't networked together and all have the exact same hardware.

Might play about with the network install version at home first though, could be useful for the future and justify the cost of networking them all together.

Thanks again.