Earlier this year, I had to have my work desktop computer reimaged. Now, I’ve gotten notification that my laptop needs to be reimaged. What causes this and what exactly is the process? The laptop is essential so we agreed to put it off until I go on vacation next week. Is it supposed to take 24 hours?
It’s just a wipe and re-install of the Operating System and the standard suite of apps.
A true re-image wipes all your personalized settings and documents.
Your company may save and restore that data, though.
An organization can put a computer into the state they want it. The operating system, system settings, all the security stuff, all the applications, all the customization, all the patches, all the files, and so on. Then they take an image of that computer.
That image can now be used on other machines to wipe out whatever used to be on the system, and turn it into an exact duplicate of the first machine. All the old data is wiped away and it is turned into a clone of the first machine.
So you shouldn’t have any files saved locally to your machine, it should all be saved on whatever network storage your company prefers. When you get your machine back, it will be just like getting a brand new machine. Same old hardware, but the operating system and whatever is returned to a known good state.
The problem of course is if it doesn’t work correctly your machine could be nonfunctional until they figure out what went wrong. But if that’s the case they should be able to just give you a known good loaner laptop. If they don’t even have one loaner laptop then what happens when someone drops their laptop and smashes it?
Interestingly enough, Win8 and newer can update the “refresh” point so you can have a fresh load of windows with whatever you want installed then create the new “windows refresh image” and allow you to snap back to that state without any external media.
Lots of variables but the 24 hour time estimate makes me think they are going to preserve some personal files and setting.
large companies which have standardized computer offerings will build an operating system “image.” so when they need to refresh the machine, they don’t reinstall Windows, run Windows Update numerous times, install all of the corporate apps, set the network/domain accounts, etc. they have a pre-built “image” for that model of computer which is the OS, apps, and configurations already set. so to refresh a machine they boot a utility from disc or a USB drive which writes the fully set up Windows installation in one shot.
incidentally, this is the way PC manufacturers do it as well.
This is especially useful for institutions like libraries and schools, where you can get reckless users making a royal mess of the computers. Most libraries will re-image all of their computers every week, if not more often.
Not a reinstall IME. They’re making a copy of an approved drive state.
Yes, the key point is perhaps that the word “image” is singular. It is the entire state of the machine in a single lump. As Lemur866 says, typically an image is taken from a machine with a a clean install of the OS, all updates applied, all needed applications installed, all updated, all necessary setting to operate in the appropriate environment set, and any locally needed documents loaded (such as templates, letterheads etc etc.) Any machine with the image applied is instantly good to go. The image is a one shot object. Creating a new image may be a significant amount of work, as it is expected that a re-imaged machine really is good to go - in that everything will work, with no additional work by the user, and by “work” one means that there are no issues with incompatibilities, known security issues, and so on. As organisation get larger and larger the difficulty is rolling out a new baseline image gets bigger, and often they lag behind the latest OS release. Sometimes by years. A big jump (say Windows 7 to 10) may break so much stuff that that many companies have still not made the jump.
Yes. Here in Hennepin County, MN Libraries, this is done automatically every night. I believe librarians also have a way to do this at any time on a specific machine (though they usually just mark it “out of order” if problems are reported. Usually, it works fine when they open the next morning.)
sounds like they use Deep Freeze or some other “instant restore” software. IIRC those just “protect” the core OS installation from modification, and anything done by users is re-directed to another “virtual” image which is deleted when the machine reboots.