October 2009
Intermediate to advanced
1760 pages
93h 25m
English
Understanding the new deployment tools and how they interconnect is the first step in beginning a Windows 7 deployment project. Figure 3-1 illustrates the Windows 7 deployment platform. At the lowest tier are Windows Imaging (.wim) files, which are highly compressed, file-based operating system images.

Figure 3-1. Windows 7 deployment platform components
At the second tier are answer files. Versions of Windows earlier than Windows Vista had numerous answer files, including Unattend.txt and Sysprep.inf, to drive the deployment process. Windows 7 uses a single XML-based answer file, Unattend.xml, to drive all its configuration passes ...