Everyone suggesting WDS or MDT is overlooking something very important- both are being phased out, and have limited or no support for Win 11.
If you are building a new workflow, you should not build on these tools. You should build on something supported going forward.
Thick/captured WIMs are generally not recommended anyway due to their higher maintenance needs. What are you trying to do in the first place? There are probably better approaches to solve that instead of capturing an image.
I’m trying to save myself some time. I have a few boxes to setup per week. They are all either Lenovo ThinkCentres or Lenovo laptops. They all need uodates, a few things uninstalled, and a minimum set of things installed, including: Office365, Adobe Reader, OoenVPN, a remote desktop connection, etc. Some of the software requires manual registry edits.
What’s your endpoint management/MDM? It sounds like your org has about 500 PCs, which means you definitely need something to manage them after deployment. That’s where I would start.
If you don’t have an MDM, you need to push upper management that you do. Intune or PDQ are probably right for your size. Each comes with strings and complications, but they will save you a significant amount of time and money in the long run
Yeah… We don’t use any endpoint management. We probably have closer to 150 PCs, but we are growing. I am half the IT dept and I’ve been here about 6 months. This is my first IT job, so I’m learning as I go, and the other guy did the same. I will definitely look into implementing Intune.