Ignoring the abuse of titular "or"s the world over, the first question you might ask is, why? The answer is coincidence (or fate or serendipity or just some really tight OS design). I was working on a proposal for work (currently so secret not even my boss knows about it) that involves FOG. WTF? No, not the obscuring pea soup you're probably used to mouth-breathing zombie-style between sips of that all-too-hot-but-not-quite-enough-to-overcome-your-scorched-tastebuds-and-wake-you-up cup o' Joe. I mean FOG Project (I think it's Free and Open-source Ghost). For those not "cool" enough to have a job where one of your many meaningful contributions is "ghosting" computers, let me explain:
When an administrator wants to deploy lots of computers (this number can vary) but wants his own software on it (read: not just the Dell crapware pre-installed but the corporate crapware. Or sometimes something worthwhile like a not-IE browser.) and also wants to be able to quickly update lots of computers and such, he basically makes a single computer have all the stuff he wants and copies it to all of the others that want that combination of software. But Windows is designed NOT to be copied. They want to thwart all the "lost sales" of piracy so there's all sorts of ways to prevent that and this is especially thorny in Windows XP. Anyway, special software exists to help administrators create "images" of computers for redistribution to other PC's. The longtime market leader is Norton Ghost, hence "ghosting" or imaging. Hopefully your eyes didn't just glaze over.
You've probably figured it out by now, it's not that complicated. I downloaded the FOG VMWare image (shameless plug: it's great software if overpriced for students), configured it for my network, created an image using another VM (I wanted a clean install and small image for testing), and sent it on its merry way up a couple of non-existent ethernet connections inside my VMWare software. Importantly, it was Win7 and it had a few things installed like iTunes, Firefox, and Chrome among others. Now normally Windows 7 would not allow installation on anything less than 512 (I think, might be 1GB though!) but I just deployed it using my little Knoppix style PXE linux environment and BAM! I'm ready to take half an hour to make and eat a sandwich (so that I can finish downloading the image not because I have some kind of weird sensual sandwich eating fetish or anything). Come back, everything's booted up nicely and I don't even have mouse lag (mostly). Took some time but I managed to browse the web with Chrome and grabbed a screenshot of the machine specs as "proof."
So there you have it. Fresh install, pack it up with Sysprep, upload it to the FOG server, and download it to the final client which doesn't do any hardware checks apparently. Simple, right?
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