Tech Tips, Dell | Altiris

Create a bootable WinPE 2.1 DVD with a self-contained restoration image. This was addressed for Linux in a precious Juice Article. I have asked permission from the creator of that article and I modified it for WinPE 2.1

Altiris® Deployment Solution™ software provides a number of tools to remotely image computers. On occasion, you might encounter situations where you need to image a computer without network connectivity or you want the image and tools available locally.

There are a few ways to have a batch script wait for a number of seconds. The simplest and most widely available without any additional programs is to use the ping command.

There are times where PXE booting seems to take a long time especially with WinPE. After making some changes to the MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) I was able to download WinPE 1.6 and 2.1 under 20 seconds.

The size of the WinPE boot file looks scary when multiple clients are downloading it in a PXE boot. I have found a way to reduce the size of the boot.wim file to 33% less in size than the boot file that Boot Disk Creator creates and of course it downloads 33% faster. The end result should have a 110 Meg size WinPE boot file.

PowerShell is the new powerful scripting language created by Microsoft. You can install it to Windows XP and above and it is included in Windows Server 2008.

Here is how to run a PowerShell Script through Deployment Server.

I recently received request for a report that would show which of our computers are covered by a warranty. I looked around and didn't see a report off hand (that was not tied to the expiration of the warranty) but I did see a lot of similar reports for expiring leases.

Hopefully my solution to this reporting problem will come in handy for someone else.

For those of you on the cutting edge (or in some cases bleeding edge it often seems) and have already migrated to Vista, here's a tip for using Dell Client Manager with those Vista machines.