Universal Restore extremely slow at restoring

Hi,

I have a question about the Universal Restore Plugin for Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1.3718 product:

We have a lot of different types of computers at the high school I work at that are running Windows XP Professional SP2. Each model such as the Dell Optiplex 170L, Dell GX 260, Dell GX280, IBM Netvista Model Type 6578 and IBM Netvista Model Type 6792 etc. all have different hardware compared to each (i.e. different motherboard etc.) Because of this I have quite a few master images at the school.

What I had to do was make a master image of each computer using the Zenworks Imaging tool because our network is in a Novell environment. The only problem is that the master image can only be deployed to the exact same type of computer that contains the same hardware inside.

This is annoying because every time we get a different model of computer in, I have to install Windows XP Professional SP2, do all windows updates, configure everything in relation to Novell, and install all the software. All of this is time consuming.

I know the reason why Windows XP Professional SP2 master images won't work on different hardware because the operating system is dependant on the hardware, because of the HAL.dll, SID, and Mass Storage drivers.

We are researching a possible solution in which we have to only have one Windows XP Professional SP2 image and can deployed on computers with completely different hardware.

Questions:

1) I read that using the Universal Restore Plugin for Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1.3718 with the BootCD takes an extremely long time to restore an image to another computer with different hardware, I read that it takes even a day.

If this is true is there a solution to speed up the restore process for Universal Restore Plugin for Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1.3718 and if so is there documentation on what to do and web links?

2) I also read about Universal Restore Plugin for Acronis True Image Enterprise Server 9.1.3718 product. I know this is obviously for servers but can it be used for workstations as well?

P.S. Before we purchase an imaging product we want to make sure that it does allow imaging Windows XP Professioanl SP2 images to computers with different hardware and that the restore process doesn't take extremely long as I've read about the Universal Restore Plugin for Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1.3718 product.

Thanks!

 

You should be looking at Acronis Snap Deploy 2.0 with the Universal Deploy option. This will allow you to have a single master image and deploy it to multiple PCs with different hardware. You will need an ASD2.0 License and a UD license for each of the PCs you wish to deploy to.