generate and print barcodes c# Preparing to Deploy Windows 7 in .NET framework

Make QR in .NET framework Preparing to Deploy Windows 7

ome organizations run a tight ship, as far as IT considerations are concerned, maintaining rigorous control over workstation configurations and preventing

users from installing or modifying any software or hardware themselves. Other organizations are considerably more casual. I once worked in the technical support department for a small, but rapidly growing, software company full of inveterate tinkerers. Our computer cases were always open, and we were constantly swapping out hard drives and memory sticks, installing beta software, and reconfiguring the operating system. Any hardware or software inventory the IT department attempted to compile would be outdated only a few hours after its completion. This experimental atmosphere fostered an excellent learning environment for the technical support staff, but it also led to chaos when the IT department wanted to deploy a database application to track technical support incidents. The IT staffers who arrived to install the application found half the workstations in various stages of disassembly, and most of the others unready in other ways to support the new software. This fiasco forced the management team to supply the technical support staff with new production workstations that we were forbidden to modify in any way. The moral of this story is that if your organization has highly skilled computer users who take care of their own workstation support, the everyday burden on the IT staff might be reduced, but large projects such as operating system upgrades might be considerably more complicated.

Organizations considering a Windows 7 deployment might need to perform a detailed inventory of the hardware in each existing workstation. A hardware inventory should include the following information for each computer:

Processor type and speed System memory Number and capacities of hard disks Amount of free hard disk space Graphic adapter type

The ways to discover this information are discussed in the following sections. Which one you choose depends on how many workstations you have to inventory, how much you can afford to spend, and what other uses you might make of the inventory tool.

The simplest method for gathering workstation inventory information is, of course, to look at each computer. You can open each computer case and look inside, but even then, it can be hard to locate the information you need. Components are often not clearly marked on the outside, and many computers pack them in so tightly that you would have to disassemble them to find out, for example, the capacities of the hard disks. And even if you can determine the disk capacities in this way, you have no way of knowing how much free space there is on the disks without starting the computer and manually checking free space as well. This method is far too complicated if you have more than two or three workstations to inventory. What you need is some sort of tool that produces a report listing the hardware inside the computer.

All of the Windows operating systems have an application called System Information, which can display extensive information about the hardware and software configuration of the local computer or another computer on the network. System Information can provide all of the essential inventory information listed earlier, and a great deal more. You can save the reported information to a System Information file with an .nfo extension, for later access, or to a text file. In Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP, System Information is accessible from the Start menu, in the All Programs\Accessories\System Tools\ folder. Launching the program displays a system summary for the local computer, as shown in Figure 1-8. This page includes processor and memory information.

The Components\Display\ page, shown in Figure 1-9, contains information about the graphics adapter.

The Storage\Drives\ page, shown in Figure 1-10, lists the hard disks in the system, their capacities, and the amount of free space available. Selecting View\Remote Computer\ enables you to connect to another system on the network and view its system information as well.