About 6-7 months ago I did a Windows 7 deployment using Windows Deployment Services. I successfully deployed the clients but I honestly still don't understand how WDS works. It seems like a really convoluted process (boot images, capture images, answer files for OOBE and Unattended, etc.). For example I want to add another image for just my laptops and I don't even think I can use the same capture boot image.
So now I need to deploy Windows 7 to 10 laptops along with our company software and settings. I went back to my WDS server and realized I had lost what understanding I had on the WDS server. I can still push the image I created 6-7 months ago but that's about it.
So should I attempt to do this with MDT instead? I have it installed but never used it. Or should I stick with WDS and find a much better step-by-step for it? I'm overwhelmed at the thought of it at the moment.
Ideally, I'd like to build my image the way I want it, sysprep, then capture and deploy. Also it would be nice if it was easy to deploy the same image in the future, update it, and capture again. This seems so difficult in WDS to me (probably because I don't understand the way it works).
For ten laptops I would definitely use MDT. Download the package from Microsoft and read through the docs, they're quite good and cover all of the steps you need to make it go. If you encounter larger numbers of machines to deploy to I would then look towards WDS but use it with MDT.
Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2012 Update 1
Think of MDT as a piece of software that greatly expands and integrates into WDS. Once you have MDT installed you really need not touch the WDS components. The most helpful resource I found was this video by Richard Smith of Microsoft : Windows 7 Image Creation and Lite Touch Deployment using MDT 2010.
It's for the 2010 version but it's mostly the same on 2012. That being said, for 10 laptops you could just use Clonezilla on a USB drive.