Windows 7 In Schools #1

Windows 7 was released through the schools agreement last Friday and so this week we have been installing it to machines.

The first thing I will point out is for those you who have been using Windows Deployment Services before Windows 7, your boot.wim will not work. You receive an error code and then on the next screen: Windows Could not apply unattended settings during pass (null). This is even when you don't try to do an unattended installation.

Although the instructions say to use the boot.wim from the server disc you will need to use the boot.wim from the Windows 7 iso you have downloaded. We have added the boot file to the one we had already that installed Vista, Server 2008 and XP. So our menu when you boot to network looks like this: The next point is you will need to update Key Management Services from 1.1 to 1.2. This should be available via WSUS from 25th August. When we tried to download it it was not available yet from microsoft download centre. This is to activate your machines. If you have less than 25 computers you can request a MAK key from microsoft instead of using your KMS key that you should see on your schools agreement licence keys page.

So we have a few machines installed but not activated yet. Any more problems we come across will be posted here to help others.