Welcome to VistaSector. Please read through our Companies (and enthusiasts) can edit the Windows XP installation to install automatically, and service packs, patches and drivers can be put into that setup. That is a tedious process, and software still has to be installed manually. The only alternative method is to 'ghost' a PC, and copy every single file onto every single computer.
With Windows Vista, however, life is made a lot easier, according to John Pritchard, Microsoft Australia Technology Specialist for Windows Client
The install DVD is actually a preinstalled copy of Vista in a series of WIM archives (Windows Imaging Format). This simply means that when you install Vista, it extracts the archives to your hard drive and configures them.
it’s a compressed image. We will ship it with fast compression, and then users just need to have the space on the hard disk for that image to be offloaded and decompressed.
John Pritchard
Upgrades to Vista are simpler because setup actually performs a clean install, and then adds in your previous settings afterwards - XP used to tediously upgrade individual files. With Vista's WIMs, the result is a stable and smooth installation.
So what about installing drivers and software? Because those WIM archives just contain the OSs files, they are actually easy to edit and add to. Using a few command-line tools you can easily inject drivers into the relevant places. On top of that, you can configure the installation to automatically run install applications for other software, such as Microsoft Office. All you have to do is edit the WIM files to your needs and burn them to a new DVD.
With the actual released build of Vista, a user can mount the install.wim file on the Vista install DVD, mount it and put the drivers in themselves through the command line utilities.
When they unmount it, they’d have to burn another DVD of course, but they could have put drivers in there with it mounted into the file system. The drivers are actually injected into the right locations in there.
John Pritchard
The result from that is your very own Vista DVD that will install all your drivers and all your software. A short but sweet process to give your installations everything they need straightaway.
Now these command-line tools aren't ideal, and no big idea is right on the first attempt, but this is a genuinely good idea for being able to install everything from the Windows VIsta setup DVD. You can even tweak it to be completely unattended.
With XP we have to fully configure one machine then copy (ghost) it onto other machines, which only works if they're identical.
With Vista, we simply edit the DVD and add in a couple of files to make everything run unattended. Burn a few copies of that and shove it in the disk drives of every computer. Come back in an hour with a perfect set of fully-configured computers ready to go. You can even do it entirely from a network. Marvellous.
LINK: Interview with John Pritchard
LINK: APC Magazine's explanation