For those who play with WindowsPE...

[Albuquerque]

... I feel the need to post and say that PE 2.0 (Vista WAIK) is stupid-fast. I can have a workstation booted into PE 2.0 and finished downloading a ghost image before my PE 1.6 image has completed doing the plug-n-play hardware detection process.

Things that rock:
True plug-n-play: Hot plug a USB drive in at any time and it's detected, given a drive letter and is ready. Or snap in a PCMCIA SCSI card, or whatever else...

Install drivers on-the-fly: New hardware that you didn't slipstream the drivers into your PE image? No problem, DRVLOAD that mofo.

Tiny size: I added all my necessary files and enabled all the necessary packages in PE 2.0 and it came out ~10MB smaller with no pruning than my highly optimized / tweaked / pruned / SDI+NTFS-compressed PE 1.6 image with the same apps.

Network speed: Gigabit network + Ghost32 + WinPE 2.0 = sustained 3000mb/min transfer from my file server. My previous "lan-speed" record was around 2200mb/min peak on PE 1.6 on the same hardware, network and file server.

Boot-to-useable: The WPEInit.exe process takes about 15 seconds, compared to about two minutes for the old Factory.exe from PE 1.6.

UFD support: PE 1.6's USB flash device boot functionality was very finicky on older IBM Thinkpad hardware; I couldn't get a single "standard" bootable UFD image to work on both IBM and Dell platforms in my environment. PE 2.0's default UFD process somehow completely fixed this; I've booted on Thinkpad R40, R50, T42, T43, T60, X30, X31, X41, X60 along with our Dell 260, 270, 280 620 and 745 machines with the same UFD.

 

[Tokelil]

Do you know if there are any tools out there for making a graphical boot CD like for example Bart's PE builder? Im using my old PE boot disk more and more and the time to boot is really annoying IMO. (Esp. compared with the DOS network disk we use normally, which ofc. is hard to beat.)

 

[Albuquerque]

Because of the massive licensing and legal agreements my company has with Microsoft, I stay far far away from anything OS-deployment related unless I can get a legal agreement in writing.

So, if it's not made by Altiris, Symantec or Microsoft, it isn't used by me for deploying OSes of any flavor. That would include any PE-builders other than MKIMG or IMAGEX.

 

[Tokelil]

I wasn't talking in the sense of deploying OS's, but I use it a lot for trouble shooting, deleting files I can't access etc.

Anyway, will see if I can get my boss to pay me for playing with PE 2.0 in the next few weeks... Thanks for your thoughts!

 

[demonic]

Is this for Vista only, or for Windows XP SP2?

 

[Albuquerque]

Is this for Vista only, or for Windows XP SP2?

WindowsPE is a "psuedo-Live CD" subset of a bigger Windows operating system. Windows PE 1.x can be sourced from various flavors of Windows XP and Server 2003, but legally you needed to have an EA or OEM Reseller agreement to use Microsoft's PE ODK. BartPE worked around this by not using the Microsoft tools, and pulling the necessary files from your own personal current Windows OS. The legality is probably questionable, but Microosft has never come after him, and with the advent of PE 2.0, they probably don't have much reason to either.

Windows PE 2.0 is sourced from a Vista OS source. For lots of reasons it's better than PE 1.6 (the latest previous version), but even moreso, it's legal to download the WAIK and use even if you're just Jane or Joe User (and have the technical capacity to build it). NO more legality issues surrounding it.

Just due to my own experience, I prefer to use the stock Microsoft tools and my own automation components. But Bart makes some good stuff (and there are some neat snap-ins that I will admit to reverse-engineering to use in a "normal" PE 1.6 build). However, due to my own biases, I wouldn't be able to give any legitimate or "good" information about what other options are better -- Microsoft is the best for my situation My situation probably isn't the same as yours