Laptops were due for replacement at work this year so that gave me a few choices when it came to OS.
Stick with Windows XP, take a chance with Vista or bite the bullet and go straight to 7. After playing with both Beta editions and RC editions I’ve  settled on the 7 option.

For most IT people, the idea of deploying a new operating system when it’s first released is probably never really considered as a good option.
After playing with 7 on my domain for a few months, I haven’t found any reason I shouldn’t be doing this. It appears stable, doesn’t appear to be causing any compatibility or interoperability issues and has a raft of benefits over Windows XP (well there is 6 or so years between them)

As I never had to deploy Vista, working with sysprep and unattended settings files in 7 is proving to be a little bit of a challenge.
Gone are the days of a simple and straight forward GUI to generate an unattended setup file.
Microsoft does have tools like the AIK and Deployment Toolkit but these still require a large amount of reading and research to understand how they work and how to use them.
Maybe there is a good 3rd party tool out there I haven’t found yet.

One strange thing that Microsoft appears to have done with 7, is removed the ability to copy a user profile over the default user profile.
You’d commonly do this after you had customized a user profile with icons / toolbar / program settings that you want every new user logon to receive when they first logon.
I did just find a setting in sysprep that may get around this.

Anyway, my challenge for today is to have an image completed ready for deployment on the 46 new laptops which are about to land in my office.