Great Norton’s Ghost!

Every summer, our technology partner would tell us “Ghost 4.0 is out now” or “Ghost 5.0 is out now” etc. And every summer, dad and I would ponder the ease which Norton Ghost could help our computer set-up in the summer. And every summer, we end up using xcopy32 (a Windows standard copy utility) to clone all of our machines.

Well, finally this summer, Ghost has gotten so appealing that we can’t resist it anymore. Today I set up the Agricultural Science computer lab (18 computers) with the new computers (incl. LCD monitors – woo!) And then used Ghost 8,0 Corporate Edition and GhostCast. I cloned 10 computers at once in under 20 minutes!!!! That’s amazing, BTW. And this was over the network. The last 8 computers also took less than 20 minutes. So even though getting the hardware all in took a good part of the day, the actual cloning took under an hour. Wow!

Will we get everything done before the teachers arrive? Um, no. Before the students arrive? Um, no. But we got a LOT done this summer. (Wish I could be satisfied with that – I’ve done pritnear all I could do except for what I do tomorrow – but I’m an inveterate worrier.) Ended up working over 9 hours at the school, so my brain has gone into OFF mode again. No matter, I have lots of lovely Olympics to watch. Oooh – and volleyball tonight, if I feel like sleeping on the sofa!

I wish we Olympics Junkies could get time off of work to watch the Olympics… It’s only every two years!

4 thoughts on “Great Norton’s Ghost!

  1. Have thus far this summer ghosted over 700 Desktops and laptops… largest single batch was 97 PCs, which, whilst they took a while to all get in sync, imaged in about an hour. Ghost ROCKS* (*apart from when it doesn’t like the switches, or the switches don’t like it… then it sucks. Or maybe the switches do)

    1. apart from when it doesn’t like the switches, or the switches don’t like it… then it sucks. I haven’t even pondered switches yet. Though usually switches are your friend. (“xcopy32 c: d: /k /r /e /c /h” used to be our bread & butter.)

      1. I meant Hardware Switches… Cisco, Netgear, etc. Some of them don’t agree with the multicast method of distribution….

        1. I meant Hardware Switches… *snerk* Yeah, I guess there’s those too… We’ve either got hubs or 3Com switches in our building. So far, no troubles yet, but mostly we’ve done things in my lab so far. Will find out later when I start to go into the classrooms to clone.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.