Hi everyone - just bought 10 of the same laptop, all came with XP and office 2007 (separate keys). Theyre all going to have the exact same stuff on them, drivers, etc, so I just want to set up one and then make that the image to put on all the others (then I will have to manually configure only a few things, like users) instead of redoing the whole thing on each computer.

But when I set it up and image, I'm going to need to change the CD key for both XP and Office 2007 on each computer to the one that came with it, otherwise itll be 10 computers running the same XP and office. Is this possible?

So I was thinking I could either use Norton Ghost or Linux to get the job done for imaging - whats the best way? Could Ubuntu LiveCD or Knoppix do it? Would I need an external hard drive to store/deploy the images? It'd be great to be able to do a bunch at once

Thanks!

If you need to make images of a Windows computer, you need Windows utilities. Linux isn't that.

Use Ghost. The only thing you could use Linux for in this scenario is as an image repository, using Samba/NFS/FTP.