Building more than ONE PC

When building more than one windows computer, its important to prepare the installation media instead of having each computer to download its own which will consume too much bandwidth and too slow. Some of the OEM installation kit or writing network installation script may be too advance for home / SOHO user so the best is to download all the important software and burn them into a CD.

The following is where I download the latest 'Complete' package for my 'Offline' installation ... The sequence follows too ...

Chrome - to browse internet. My habit is not to launch IE until I have virus scanner in place. I have had bad experiences where the first thing the old IE did was to download a virus.

Acrobat Reader - I install this be default. Most of the business documents on web are pdf. Later stage I may want to prepare an installation media that disable auto update by default too.

Avast - Virus scanner of choice

Avast Latest Update - because its easy to update its virus definition, its just an exe file !

Spybot - spyware ad-ware prevention

Spybot latest update

I install Spybot the last so that it wouldn't keep on asking me if I want to install the virus scanner etc. Minimizing number of clicks is 'important' when you install more than 2 computers.

Once downloaded all above offline installation, it will be just nice to burn them into a CD ( less than 700MB on 22 July 2011 ). But there shouldn't be a worry cause there are DVD and better still, use USB drives. But my environment is filled with tons of OLD PC ... with 256MB RAM and 36X CD ROM is considered 'fast' ....

Other Options

AVG x86 or AVG 64bit - also Virus scanner of choice ... but its harder to update its virus definition so I don't use this normally. AVG Latest Update

Claimwin is the ultimate FREE virus scanner for all systems even server OS. So I always have Clamwin installed side by side with Avast or AVG as a backup. Although improved a lot now, but Clamwin is weak on prevention. Its ok on scanning and killing viruses but its main winning feature is its legally FREE for all to use.

I used to install Zone Alarm but now windows comes with firewall. Although windows firewall doesn't do much but its ok together with Spybot and virus scanner, I find Zone Alarm being redundant nowadays. However, for machines that can't install virus scanner like windows server operating system, I will install Zone Alarm there.

Firefox is also popular but its only good if you really like all those add-ons. I just browse so I don't like Firefox. After all, IE has tons of addons too anyway ...

Thunderbird is the email of choice but old windows comes with Outlook Express, the new windows uses Live Mail. But quite a handful are assessing their emails through web browser too. So I only install Thunderbird if the user needs it.

After the 'important' installations, I then follow with PDFCreator, OpenOffice, Teamviewer, IrfanView, MpcStar ... Oh yea, and lastly I may do the Windows Update the last cause it will take such a long time and reboot so many times ...