Setup HP Thin Clients with SCCM 2007 using XPembedded

The following will show you how to setup a T5720 thin client to work with SCCM as well as using the captured data image.  This process can be used with the T5730 series as well.  Josh and I have worked on this for a few months now and we finally figured out the right combination of VBScripts and cleaning of the hard drive to get this all to work how we wanted for our corporate environment.

Visit Josh’s blog: http://joshuasmueller.wordpress.com/

NOTE:  I do not support any of the scripts, but give a base of what I have implemented.  Any changes are done at your own risk.

Some of these customizations can be changed based on your environment, I have made this post as a reminder for myself as to what I all did to get these thin clients running.

Comments, Questions, and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Windows – Defragmenting the Hard Drive

So some of us have the issue where we transfer tons of files between different computers.  As time passes this amount of file transfer added with software installations and removals can quickly make a fast system appear somewhat slower.  Many people might say that a fragmented hard drive will not cause much slowness, but in computer speed even milliseconds are a lot.

Here are a few of the different options you can use with Windows:

• Manually running the disk defrag program.
• Creating a command line batch file to run the defrag.
• Using 3rd party applications to run the defrag.
• Creating a VBScript to run the defrag command.

Windows XPe – EWFDLL.DLL & Imaging

What does this code do?
The following code will reconfigure the Enhanced Write Filter (EWF) on thin client devices after they have been cloned.

Why do we need it?
After cloning a thin client device, the EWF will state that it cannot get the correct configuration.  This also means you cannot enable/disable/commit any changes to the device.  If you try to make changes to the device before reconfiguring EWF, the changes will be lost after the next reboot.  Once you run the command you will need to reboot and then the EWF will be in an enabled mode.