Hmm... the fact that you want a tech to go on-site, pop in a boot-able cd, and expect it to have nic drivers built-in is going to be very very tough.

At Hershey, we have a common desktop architecture where we have a finite # of hardware configurations.  So, i was able to include the drivers needed for every hardware configuration in the CD.

To expect a CD to boot and be able to recognize and use the built-in nic of any random computer is going to be incredibly tough, if not impossible.

A thought would be to include drivers for a bunch of popular chipsets and nics, but to also have each tech carry a usb nic with them that you know the CD will be able to recognize and use.

You mentioned 'extend the lifetime of some older laptops' so that sounds like you might also want to run the cd on a work-laptop which would then have a known hardware configuration that you can plan for, with regards to drivers.

No, these CD's would be going into Comcast owned laptops, not customer machines, so I can plan for which drivers to use. Most of these laptops would be Dell Latitude D610's, D600's, 131L's, or 120L's.

I was able to get the UBCD4Win compiled and working, it's just 714MB, so it won't fit onto a CD (I tested it with VMWare). I just have to go through the (long) list of apps that are included with UBCD4Win and eliminate some unnecessary ones to get it down below 700MB.

BTW, I found the instructions/files for including Flash into the build at http://www.bootcd.us/BartPE_Plugin_Details/126/Mozilla-Firefox-Flash-plugin.html in case anyone else needs to do this.

Success!!

All my prior efforts with winpe were with the older 1.x version which used the XP/win2k3 server kernels.

I just downloaded and used the new WAIK toolkit to create a new winpe 2.0 image.  I've already included Opera in it with full flash support.  As proof, I'm able to watch a youtube clip.

Did some digging, the difference between bartpe and winpe is that Bart basically did all the work himeself to create the 'PE' environment that will boot from a CD.  MS used to provide WinPE only to Enterprise customers, but as of WinPE 2.0 (vista kernel based), they provided a free download for anyone to play with it.

One really nice feature included in winpe 2.0 is Ramdisk support.  Winpe basically tricks anything that needs to write to the disk, and re-directs their write request to the ramdisk.  The size is configurable and in my test image, i upped it to 64mb (didn't want it too big as the target may not have enough memory to handle it).

er?  This is just the kernel.  We aren't talking about the layers upon layers of crap running on top of the kernel that is installed in the normal Vista system.  The thing doesn't even run explorer, nor does it have a start menu, or anything else.

sigh, never mind.  Just trying to help out with a different avenue... you did post this in the 'support group' thread after all.

I have the iso's that i've created from playing around with it.  If you hope on AIM, i can transfer one to you.

Winpe is definitely not as easy as using bartpe as Bart has definitely put a lot of effort into the whole plugin support and making his product as easy to use as possible.

Basically, winpe is a stripped down version of Windows with only the bare components.  The cd image boots to a floating cmd prompt window in a blank desktop.  No icons, no taskbar, nothing, just the floating cmd prompt window.  And you enter commands to load up normal apps like notepad, regedit, taskmgr, etc.  Things that aren't included by default can easily be added

This is pretty bare bones, but it does have some nifty features that Bart might not.  Because it is Vista-based, it have ip4 and ip6 support.  It "supports driver injection, which enables you to load drivers either before or after Windows PE has launched".  If "you start Windows PE and discover that it lacks a necessary driver, you can load the nonstandard driver from removable media and immediately use the hardware without rebooting."  Useful when building the cd for the first time and trying to get everything to work right.

The only bad thing is the vista-based winpe 2.x needs 256mb of memory.  You'll easily know why when you start looking at the source .wim file and it is 160MB all by itself and that it, by default, wants to create a virtual 32mb ramdisk as well.  I tweaked my test virtupc machine to only have 128mb of ram and it errored-out when trying to boot winpe.  "Ramdisk device creation failed due to insufficient memory."

Since the cmd prompt window that gets launched is essentially a type of autoexec.bat script, you can edit the script and make it load anything you want at boot.  Write your own custom UI and have it launch.  I haven't played with it yet, but supposed I can inject MHT support which would enable me to create a web-based application using only html code.  If you've never used .mht files in the past, they are pretty powerful and would enable you to create a simple UI to launch apps.  At least, from the documentation i've read, this should be supported, i haven't tried injecing the support yet.  I can try it tonight.

Good article to see what it looks like and instructions on how to download and create a basic image.  http://mattoid.com/data/computing/winpe_and_imagex.htm