this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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Some of the issues described in the article must be driving corporate IT departments insane. They thrive on consistent installations across machines. Having each one offering different features (even temporarily) is the opposite of that.
Just imagine how many tutorials, documentations, videos and so on Microsoft has made obsolete by just moving the start menu from the lower left side to the middle. And yes, you totally can't expect users to find the new position on their own, some people are interesting
Any IT department worth their salt will have solved this problem years ago. It's hard to explain if you've never managed Windows in an enterprise setting but there's a reason that profit-hungry corporations all use Windows. Here's the full process for getting any Windows laptop to work perfectly:
If they have a channel supplier that offers 'white glove' service they don't even need to do that and they can even have brand new laptops drop-shipped to a user at home without ever needing to touch it. And if that laptop fucks up down the line it can just be wiped and as soon as Windows connects to the Internet it can automatically re-enrol itself into the organisation's management system.
With PXE boot you don't even need a USB. Boot into the imaging "OS" over the network.
My workplace has a couple of dedicated network switches on a dedicated "imaging" VLAN in the hardware room, that way normal users can't accidentally reimage their own machine. I think the desktop guys can get 32 going at once, and the complete automated setup time for one is like 40 minutes.
I'm currently losing the fight with my second level (whom supplies our PXE server) about keeping it. They tried setting it up twice since September, the first worked the first time I used it, then never again after that. The second never worked as far as I can tell. They say that it's "being depreciated", and therefore should be dropped.
The group policy management has a lot of options. You can control automatic and manual behavior, or do the whole update delivery yourself. Of course, that all comes with effort and investment into administration and management.