Total Unattended Setup of entire Carpc

Ryan711 · 10-07-2007, 11:03 PM

Well I have just a couple of months ago received a lot of decommissioned dell workstations with xp pro from a Lockheed Martin office that was upgrading to new workstations with Vista.

Up until this time I was just considering selling the workstations and taking whatever profit I could get from it, but I am really lazy and I ultimately wanted to start a massive folding farm. So today I was reading a thread on some other forums about how some of the members were creating a total unattended setup/install of a home theater pc.

I immediately connected the difficulty of gathering components and getting them all to work together with the software easily with setting up a carpc. It seems like there is always something that goes wrong, and it is twice as bad if you are sitting in a hot car trying to troubleshoot something.

What I'm ultimately proposing is that the we could choose a specific set of hardware and I would create a custom cd with that installs the OS and installs and configures all of the programs automatically. With a locked down set of hardware and accessories there would be virtually no problems setting up everything. It would basically plug in components, insert the disk, and go have a beer.

Before I started such an endevour I just wanted to gauge everyones interest to see if they would like to see something like this. I would sell the disk with fully licensed version of xp pro for probably around $100-120 since I got them for basically free, though I only have around 250 licenses so after that the price might raise a little.

So what do you guys think? Is this something that would pique your interest or am I just wasting my time?

ThunderStick · 10-08-2007, 10:10 AM

No thanks, I seem to change my setup constantly and dont see a real need for this. I tried this myself and found that everytime I redid my carputer software something was going to change anyway.
Sorry dude but limiting people to specific hardware and software in this business is not really gonna happen.
Most people have a carputer so they can customize it.
Maybe you could throw in the standard set though.
XP PRO
Iguidance
Xport
winamp
and maybe a few codecs

Crawdaddy · 10-09-2007, 11:59 AM

setting up fully automated installs can be accomplished 2 serparate ways. One is through Norton Ghost or a similar product. The second is to set up an unattended script for the install of windows, which can then (silently) install a myriad of applications. I have been developing unattended installs on and off for years. It really isn't that hard, just takes patience and time. You are not limited to a specific set of hardware with an unattended CD. Additionally, you can do a after-install automatically spawned WPI where the user can choose what apps he/she chooses to install, and it silently installs those applications. Not that hard....Look up MSFN for help.