Designing a Build with WinPE

After 4 weeks of learning about WinPE, I decided to download the evaluation and try it myself. That appears the only way to get a real idea of how the process works.

In the past few weeks, we have also found some limitations of winPE, which we hope MS will correct. The main limitations are in the area of scripting; the exposed layers don't always return the correct information especially concerning hardware. The number of CPUs is fixed at 1, so designing multi-processor builds require asking the user the number of processors.

There are some others which I'll post later after I receive some feedback from MS.

All in all, WinPE is quite a step up from the previous build processes. It allows for a third-party application to image the drive (we use Ghost), and then syspreps the drive to set up the Registry and SID correctly. In our trials I can test under Virtual PC and then move the build to real hardware.

The amount of time saved is considerable and I suggest those that build systems for several servers to definetely check out WinPE.

Currently we build for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems on 3 hardware types: Dell, HP, and IBM.

More later.