Help with Win 7 & Win 10 Slipstream options

[Niku-Sama]

OK so long story short I started a new job with a non profit that need quite a bit of help and some optimizations to minimize down time.
They have quite a infrastructure built up out of literal scraps from other organizations. They have all their bulk licensing in order and plenty of keys to go around but the hardware aspect is a constant rotation.

as an example most of the systems are Dell Pentium 4 OptiPlex towers or older systems that were used extensively before they got them.
I organized the storage room and dumped a lot of systems that were just too old for their standards or didn't pass visual inspection (bulging caps, missing components, scorch marks) I got it down to about 20 or so decent looking systems Pentium D or Core 2 Duo's and newer of various makes/models

That's the background.

I need a some info on creating slipstream installs of windows 7 and 10 both Pro that will be up to date and also have Office 2016 programs installed aswell. They have a bulk license for Office 365 ProPlus but I need the local applications on there with the install in order to really save some time.

i remember how to do the windows 7 updates in a slip stream from my personal experience but I am at a loss on how to do it with Win10 or to get Office 365 Pro/2016 on a 7/10 slipstream.

that's the bulk of what I need help with, the other less important part would be having some settings pre set when its installed like with fancy themes turned off performance options set to make things run faster as opposed to looking fancier that sort of thing. Aero really kills the performance of these things and some times its a chore to turn it off just to get the system going.

any tips, hints, walkthroughs or good apps you guy could recommend would be a huge help

 

[Janus67]

Alrighty, a few things:

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) is free and will let you pre-package an OS with updates. You can use it to make your golden image, sysprep it, then deploy to other machines.

Assuming machines are on a domain you can control performance/themes/etc via group policy. Alternatively, you can build it into the default profile for the machines.

That said, I would imagine that the machines don't have drivers so you will be at the mercy of whatever Win10 has built in to support the machines.

If you are stuck with the machines, for the C2D machines, I'd see if you can get any funding at all I'd fight for SSDs and RAM for the machines. That would give new life back into those machines.

Otherwise, depending on funding, keep an eye out for local colleges/etc that surplus their machines. You could likely pick up 2nd-3rd gen i3 or i5 machines for about $100-150

 

[Alaric]

What about the support issues? Windos 10 won't be supported by M$ on those processors. As in, will W10 even install on those systems? Skylake and newer is the cut off point. Or am I missing something on the enterprise situation in regard to M$' rather insistent stance on the subject?

 

[Niku-Sama]

Alrighty, a few things:

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) is free and will let you pre-package an OS with updates. You can use it to make your golden image, sysprep it, then deploy to other machines.
Assuming machines are on a domain you can control performance/themes/etc via group policy. Alternatively, you can build it into the default profile for the machines.

That said, I would imagine that the machines don't have drivers so you will be at the mercy of whatever Win10 has built in to support the machines.
If you are stuck with the machines, for the C2D machines, I'd see if you can get any funding at all I'd fight for SSDs and RAM for the machines. That would give new life back into those machines.
Otherwise, depending on funding, keep an eye out for local colleges/etc that surplus their machines. You could likely pick up 2nd-3rd gen i3 or i5 machines for about $100-150

Ok i'll look up MDT, can it handle loading office into the image or will that be another can of worms?

Any machine that gets sent out now gets stuffed with as much ram as we can now, when I came on a few weeks ago I found a shoe box filled with ram. I sorted out the old stuff and still had about half a box of usable ram. Unfortunately a lot of the systems only have 2 slots, the ram in there was pulled from deceased P4 systems and while its still DDR2 nothing is very fast, I haven't seen any 800Mhz or faster ram. I'm still feeling them out in terms of buying SSDs but with the high turn around and the fact some one could call us up any time with a donation keeps them from putting too much into the employee machines. SSDs were something I was thinking of too.

What about the support issues? Windos 10 won't be supported by M$ on those processors. As in, will W10 even install on those systems? Skylake and newer is the cut off point. Or am I missing something on the enterprise situation in regard to M$' rather insistent stance on the subject?

oh yea no problem installing, the driver library covers the older systems pretty well, its when we get something a bit newer it becomes a problem but with such a huge variety of systems its going to be hard to pin down specific drivers for everyone. as long as its able to connect to the internet with a default NIC driver it'll hunt down whats needed. its generally doesn't need any thing special, most of these systems don't have a video card and the ones that do are a Silicon Image card that basically just gives a DVI port.


To give you an idea of what comes through...

the last batch they got from the City was all these dells I am talking about plus a few dual xeon dell precision servers that were desperately needed to replace their old servers, I have the ram at home to fully populate them to help them out (fully buffered DDR2)

the batch before that though was a mixed bag from the County, that was a pile of Socket A systems and 6 Alienware Aurora-R3 systems, 5 of which were fully functional.

so some of the scraps still have decent meat on the bones...