What happens on first boot of a Dell business laptop?

Trying to guess in advance what I will have to do to transfer Dell's default image to my own hard drive when it arrives.

Mine is a M6400 Covet but this should be the same for all business laptops.

When you first turn on your laptop, what do you get? Does it go straight to windows, completely pre-configured? Or do you get a Dell pre-install boot, that allows you to configure user names etc., formats the drive properly, does an install, and from then on you get windows?

The HP laptop I had was the latter. The first boot was an HP bootable pre-image that did the actual windows install. I'm hoping this is what Dell does, since it makes it much easier to use whatever drive you like. (Also makes more sense for them, since they can use one 5GB image on all machines and not have to wait for the whole drive to write.)

 

No, Windows is installed. I have never heard of it not being installed (like on your HP, was it a refurb?) You will boot and enter usernames. It is already setup.

Greg

 

The HP was new. On the HP, everything was set up, all software and drivers were "preinstalled", ready to go, but done on a small pre-image that would fully configure your hard drive on first boot.

One of the stages in the HP boot was user names. Another was whether it was 32 or 64 bit Vista.

This is something that is new to Vista I believe.

 

The reason that HP has the install at the first boot is that they have images for both the 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows. You pick which one to install at the first boot and it installs it.

 

It also correctly formatted for the size of my drive, and took my time zone and user name info.

I guess I'll just have to experiment when the laptop gets here, and see how Dell does things. Thanks!

 

When I got my D630, first boot took me straight into the plain vanilla Vista OOBE. From there I set up my user account, auto updates, and that was it.

 

"OOBE"... Thank you! That was specific enough to tell me exactly what's going on.

Googled it, saw screenshots, all set now!