We use MSE for anti-virus, and I’ve had nothing but problems when pre-installing it on the image I push out.
If I do pre-install it, when a user logs (student) in, they get a popup box for MSE, something about finishing the install process I believe.
Also, as for “…and will (should) not differ between your hosts”, if a piece of software shouldn’t differ between hosts, isn’t that more of a reason to allow a snap-in to be applied to all hosts like my idea?
Lastly, I like to have anti-virus and other software available via snapin rather than pre-installed for many reasons:
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[]The process of having FOG push the image out to multiple PCs takes less time because the image is smaller than if the snapins were pre-installed. The snapins need to install afterwards, yes, but when imaging 60+ PCs with a 10 PC queue, the most important thing is getting the image deployed on each machine fast so that a spot in the queue opens up for the next machine.
[]It’s nice to have a piece of software deployable via snapin remotely for well, remote systems you don’t have access to or don’t want to physically go to, or for ease and scheduling. Example: a professor has a different anti-virus on a laptop he brings in, he decides he wants to switch to the anti-virus we use. He uninstalls old anti-virus, I add the snapin to his PC in FOG then deploy it, it installs in the background silently while he works, or his office is locked, or whatever.
[*]What if you decide to change anti-virus (or another piece of software, i.e. Office)? If its preinstalled, then you have to go back to an image backup, uninstall the anti-virus software, install the new software, sysprep it back up, re-upload it, change imageid for all the PCs that were using old software to newly uploaded imageid, re-deploy to all PCs. Whereas if its a snapin, you just create the new snapin, remove the old snapin from all PCs, add the new snapin to all PCs, redeploy.
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For these reasons, and others, I support the idea of having hardly any applications pre-installed on my image. I’m open to hearing rebuttals and reasons for the contrary, however.
