I apologise early if i appear ranting. I have been preparing to upgrade our organisation to SP3 and have spent most of the night working on the unattended deployment and now am faced with non working WPA.
We have about a dozen PC's, all Windows XP Professional. These PC's all have legitimate COA's affixed to the side of the PC. Some have been around for 5 years and have obviously been reinstalled/reimaged in that time. The deployment process we use allows us to supply each PC with their unique product code on startup (sysprep).
Now I am faced with multiple machines here that will not activate online and force me to ring the telephone dial in. One of these machines is just over a year old and only been activated once or twice.
I do not understand why a process which we have used flawlessly in the past (Online activation) now stops working and we are treated like criminals. If i was a criminal I would have used one of the readily available VLK's and this problem would not exist.
Support tell me that they cannot do anything about it. I call bogus. There is a database somewhere that says "This Key/HW/etc CANNOT do online activation". I want this changed, or will MS pay my time to manually activate all our machines.
SO far, it seems to me its easier (for me) to get a VLK and install that way. We have legitimate licenses that are being refused to us.
I am new to these forums so have no idea how they work, please email me if needed
jared@thanhandjared.net
Edit: For machines not yet reimaged I am going to backup the activation and use the deployment tool to "activate" the machine that way. For the handful I have been testing on I will use the phone.
This still doesnt make me happy, but we will persevere for now. Later this year we are moving entirely to Linux where life is so much easier.
The sysprep tool is NOT intended to assist with deployment of OEM installations of XP. The sysprep tool is designed to facilitate the deployment of volume licensing editions of XP Professional only.
While a small business with only 10 computers may not find it cost effective, the proper way to deploy an image in your circumstances would be for your organization to purchase a Volume License for Windows XP Pro which would then permit you to use sysprep to deploy a master image.
Another option which would work if the computers have enough hardware similarities and are from the same major computer manufacturer would be to build a model installation on one computer using the manufacturer supplied recovery solution installation as a starting point and then installing and configuring other software and Windows as desired by your organization. Then using a third party imaging tool (Acronis, Ghost, etc) image the rest of the fleet.
Of course, assuming these exisiting instalaltions were already validated and running fine, you could have deployed SP3 by copying the full file to each computer over the network and just installed it from the console...that would have taken less than 2 hours to get them all done.For great advice on all topics XP, visit http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp
Marked as answer byStephen HolmMonday, April 20, 2009 7:57 PM
The sysprep tool is NOT intended to assist with deployment of OEM installations of XP. The sysprep tool is designed to facilitate the deployment of volume licensing editions of XP Professional only.
While a small business with only 10 computers may not find it cost effective, the proper way to deploy an image in your circumstances would be for your organization to purchase a Volume License for Windows XP Pro which would then permit you to use sysprep to deploy a master image.
Another option which would work if the computers have enough hardware similarities and are from the same major computer manufacturer would be to build a model installation on one computer using the manufacturer supplied recovery solution installation as a starting point and then installing and configuring other software and Windows as desired by your organization. Then using a third party imaging tool (Acronis, Ghost, etc) image the rest of the fleet.
Of course, assuming these exisiting instalaltions were already validated and running fine, you could have deployed SP3 by copying the full file to each computer over the network and just installed it from the console...that would have taken less than 2 hours to get them all done.For great advice on all topics XP, visit http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp
Marked as answer byStephen HolmMonday, April 20, 2009 7:57 PM
