Andreas said:
I deploy WindowsXP in a lab of 14 computers and I have been using
imaging to perfrorm this. Some of the PCs may have changed something in
their hardware and now when I re-apply the image, 4 of them require
activation. Some of those cannot connect to the Internet and it gives me
the option to use telephone. I want to avoid this because it will be an
overseas call and this work is not actually my responsibility so I want
to know if there is a way to enter windows, configure network settings
and then activate.
Could try volume licensing agreement if you got enough seats to manage
it, works great for us, none of this business-crippling activation shit
that only honest businesses need to deal with, alternatively consider
Linux until Microsoft learn that penalising their honest customers is
only losing them business.
Apparently the Select agreement and volume licensing may be a problem
even for larger scale buyers like ourselves with Vista, some rubbish
about having to set up our own license servers or some such rot. Vista
is a mess with close to 20% of our corp apps not working on it in our
initial trial (unlike XP way back when we did our last jump which was a
breath of fresh air after NT and was nothing but magic in comparison in
our opinion, with only minor issues in relation to migration) so we have
no intention of jumping at this point, but a lot of us are looking
forward to future Powershell based OS's which give the impression that
in the future Vista will be considered as Win ME II in comparison, but
due to the potential of a crippling licensing model we are now starting
to seriously look towards open-source, not something we would've
remotely considered prior to Microsoft enforcing cripple-ware to such a
degree, but we'll see how much pain will be involved with mass repeated
deployments when we do decide to jump. Perhaps when enough people say
"screw this" and shuffle sideways they'll back off and grow a brain.
