The ISO created will include no user profile folders, personal user data and files. My customized image came out to be about 8.5 GB in size.
Notice that depending on how much space pre-installed software takes, you might not be able to burn this ISO to a standard 4.7 GB DVD disk but have to use a dual layer disk or a USB flash drive instead.
Installation using this ISO will take somewhat longer than using a standard ISO because it not only contains full Windows setup, but also the pre-installed software. It will also contain a customized and personalized default user profile, the base Windows uses whenever a new user profile will be created.Ī customized default user profile means that whenever a new user account is created, all customizations (Start tiles, File Explorer & desktop icon and view settings, colors, wallpaper, theme, screensaver and so on will be applied to new user profile instead of Windows defaults. This method will produce an ISO image which can be compared to any original Windows 10 ISO you download from Microsoft, apart from the fact that it already contains pre-installed software according to your choice. Virtual machine generation is irrelevant, you can use Generation 1 or 2 as you wish You can do this in virtual machine’s settings: If you will do this on a Hyper-V virtual machine (which is the recommended method), make sure to set the new virtual machine to use Standard Checkpoints instead of default Production Checkpoints.
The ADK is a free native Microsoft tool, downloadable directly from Microsoft. Oracle VirtualBox and VMware users might need to consult their preferred virtualization platform’s documentation if instructions can’t be used as is.Įverything in this instruction can be made in each edition of Windows 10 (in Home and Single Language editions using a third party virtualization platform) with native Windows tools and programs, apart from Windows Deployment and Imaging Tools, part of Windows 10 Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) needed later in the post. All virtual machine references and instructions in this tutorial apply to Hyper-V, available in Windows 10 PRO, Education and Enterprise editions.
NOTE: This post will show how to use a virtual machine to create the ISO.
So, after going through a couple of re-images of my laptop with some failures attached to that, I finally was able to get the process down so that time would not be waisted for the oncoming new hires once they received their laptop.
The issue was that all of our laptops came with Windows 10 Professional and we needed to upgrade them to Enterprise edition.Īfter finding a working key for Enterprise Edition, we were still having issues joining the MS Azure domain so that we could get all of the needed software properly to being onboarding with Microsoft. All of the new FTCs received laptops and needed to have the newest build of Windows 10 installed. I’ve been currently assisting with onboarding at my new Full Time Contractor position at Microsoft.