This week at work we had a new HP business laptop and a 2 year old engineering desktop to load and deploy. My PC tech and I decided to give Win 7 a try, Business edition. The laptop is a dual core Centrino, 2Gb of RAM, run of the mill laptop. The engineering box is a dual quad core 3 GHz with 4Gb of RAM and very nice video card meant for Autocad.

I have quite a few group policies to manipulate firewalls, add machines and users to various group according to department or job type and of course a policy for WSUS. I run a layered network with multiple gateways and a web filter proxy, and a policy for that. I have an ESET administrator console with push installation.The laptop got Win 7 business x32. The engineering machine got Win 7 business x64.

I have to say that after running through my usual scripts to configure these machines for the domain (and after adjusting one script for the new syntax to control the firewall), these were the two easiest machines I have set up.....ever. I have been doing this same type of setup for 6 years on countless XP machines and even a few 2000 stragglers, but this was outstanding. We will be doing a few more 'tester' machines over the next two weeks, so check back here for my results.

So far, I am very impressed. Let's hope it continues.