Save me from activating 48 Vista computers by hand!

August 8, 2007 5:26 AM

Thanks to a bit of confusion in our department I have an entire lab of 48 computers with the wrong Windows Vista product key. I have been given the correct one but would like to save myself as much headache as possible. I have a script that will rewrite the product key and successfully activate the computers but I need help on how to most efficiently get it out there.

All 48 computers are on the domain with a higher level GPO being applied. The script needs to be run as administrator in order to work. Of course I could log on to each machine manually as administrator and run it off a USB key or network share, but I hoped maybe someone here had a much more efficient idea. Each computer is named differently so anything involving a script for access would have to accept a %ComputerName% modifier of some sort since Vista requires ComputerName\Username for logins in a domain environment. Also all administrator accounts on these computers are the same with the same password. Any ideas?

posted by genial to technology (4 comments total)

I would use psExec from Sysinternals to remotely run the script.
posted by stovenator at 5:44 AM on August 8, 2007

Or you could alternatively look at startup scripts from within Group Policy.
posted by stovenator at 5:47 AM on August 8, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Doesn't your organization use some sort of mass-imaging solution? The university where I work uses Altiris' solution. (If you have much more than the one lab, you probably shoud use something like that to save yourself some headaches!)
posted by Matt Oneiros at 10:02 AM on August 8, 2007

Oneiros, ironic you mention it. The VP of our department literally just signed off to purchase Altiris yesterday and we hope to have that implemented by October. I use ghost to image everything but adding them to the domain and naming the computers a certain way takes too much time to make it worthwhile just for the product key information.

Psexec looks like a very likely candidate, and an awesome program for the toolbox. Thanks stovenator!
posted by genial at 3:40 PM on August 8, 2007