Windows – Best Way to Set Up New Employee Laptop Without Windows Server

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I ran a few Windows based labs over a decade ago, past few years I've mostly been managing Macs and systems in AWS and GCP. Right now the company is hiring a lot of finance folks who want to work on Windows laptops. The basic setup is I setup a local admin account so we always can get back into the machine, add a user account for the new employee, and install basic apps like Google Chrome, Office, Zoom, etc. nothing too fancy. We don't have Active Domain control running, don't have SCCM at this time. With this context, I was wondering if there's a way to do a simple automated install to new laptops similar to MacOS Migration Assistant, where a new laptop already has a fresh Windows OS from the factory, and I just want to transfer the user account and additional apps installed. I did some research and mostly saw more elaborate enterprise options using SCCM and Windows Server etc.

Best Answer

You can use Windows Configuration Designer to create provisioning packages for Windows client OS.

Next, you copy the package to a flash drive and boot PC from it to provision Windows with required settings.

Check documentation here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/provisioning-packages/provisioning-create-package

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