Windows Preinstallation Environment VS FOG Project

"Just say no." For home computers, I said no many years ago and never looked back. Best computer-related decision I ever made. However I sometimes wonder, since strides have been made in booting Windows from USB and with introduction of WinPE, could we have a small, limited purpose "Windows botable USB drive" that we could boot into to edit Word documents or Excel spreadsheets or some other Office task, then... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago

It is well known that windows does not play well with anything boot related. Veracrypt needs to install a bootloader in order to properly boot, and windows often modifies the UEFI that is likely to cause conflicts. You can try to use something like Window PE or Linux from an usb and modify your boot loader. Source: almost 3 years ago

If your school computers weren't configured to prevent booting on a USB flash drive, you can make a bootable Windows PE USB flash drive, make your school computers boot on it, and use regedit from Windows PE to edit the Windows registry of the Windows install on the computer's hard drive, as I have yet to see any school computer on which the Windows partition is encrypted. Then you can find a way to get admin... Source: about 3 years ago

I heard about devbox [1] but I haven't tried it yet. Perhaps it could suit your needs. Back in the day I used "Norton Ghost" to create a full image of a just-installed windows just in case I needed to go back in time. Windows includes a snapshot feature built-in but I did not really trusted it. These days you can use a "sysprep" tool [2] to create a similar system snapshot. Make a partition and keep everything you... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago

For provisioning the machines base image consider FOG it uses PXE and can remotely provision dozens of machines using multicast. Source: 5 months ago

Same. We set up 1 device how we want to, then use FOG to clone the other devices. Source: 5 months ago

With standard computers, I usually deploy something like the fog project and automate the process over pxe with scheduled reboots. I guess you could do that as well with your VMs but that seems overkill. Source: about 1 year ago

You could setup a PXE server and automate installs. You could also clone them and reapply the image as needed. https://fogproject.org/ or lookup CloneZilla both are open source. Source: about 1 year ago