I managed to prepare a Windows 7 Professional image with sysprep for deployment to a wide variety of hardware, and so far it works fairly well.
It currently installs drivers upon first boot after deployment with driver packs released by DriverPacks.net combined with the site's Stand Alone Driverpack utility (I've also tried their Snappy Driver Installer which also works). I am OK with this setup, except the driver packs from that site are often two or even three years old, and I'd prefer to have a more updated set of drivers.
Is there another solution similar to DriverPacks that allows detection and installation of drivers upon first boot? Perhaps even packs released by others that work with the DriverPacks utilities mentioned above? Thank you!
P.S. We've considered Microsoft Deployment Toolkit but found it too time-consuming and complicated to maintain for our relatively small organisation.
I don't know how small your org is, but MDT is worth the learning curve. As far as driver options, there aren't many, one being that you can create a shared folder and add it to the
devicePathregistry key for driver detection.A downside of this approach is that whatever device you plug in after the fact, be it a simple keyboard or mouse, windows will attempt to scan this entire location before installing best matched drivers, so after imaging I would remove this path, as it has the potential to cause substantial delays in hardware detection.
I won't talk about MDT options since you aren't interested, but it's definitely worth a look.