Reply 60 of 133, by Intel486dx33
Okay, Then yes you might want to build a Win-NT server with large capacity drives. You could use something like a HP 8300 SFF PC as a server and just add some large capacity hard drives.
Install a network monitoring application and performance monitoring client software on the PC’s.
Install something like “Symantec ghost” or “Lab expert image blaster” software. Its an application for creating and pushing out hard drive images over the network. So if a computer becomes unusable you can push out a fresh image in an instant and reload the computer in minutes. You could also create multiple images and have them stored on your server of all the stuff you want loaded on your PC’s.
You could have a DOS/3x image, Win95 image, Win-2000 image, XP image etc. Pre-configured with all the software and games you plan on playing.
To do this you want to try to keep all the computers as identical as possible in hardware but you could create individual images too for
Each computer but for mass distribute of the same image to all the computers you want identical hardware.
Its easy to do and once you get it setup life becomes easy. We used these hard drive image distribution applications in the computer education sector to reload the classroom computers with anything the instructors wanted to teach.
All you need is a Win NT 4.0 or WIn-2000 workstation or server set up as your server.
With just 3 clicks of the mouse you could reload and entire classroom of 30 computers in just 5 minutes over the network
But I would definitely get a router and switch.