Chris Nackers

Maybe we should start with that then. You say "the way WE want". Ideally, how would you like to build/image machines? Not using a particular product, just from a process standpoint. If you can tell us that, maybe we can direct you to the best way to handle that with ConfigMgr, or possibly a combination of tools. Microsoft certainly has best practices they would like people to use, but that doesn't mean that is the only way to accomplish. The typical drawback to ghost is that it isn't hardware independent, you can turn around a deploy the same hardware easily, but deploying that image to a laptop from a desktop can be challenging without the appropriate configuration. Hope that helps.

When you say ugly HP splash screen, are you trying to capture an image of a OEM machine? What OS is this? You need to use volume license media to deploy an os, you can't capture OEM media and redeploy it. Typically you would have a single image that covers all your hardware, it's a hardware independent image. You typically would have a task sequence to build and capture, or you could use a task sequence to just sysprep and capture a already build system. I can't speak to your splash screen change, since i'm not 100% sure what you are referring to.

If you are going to capture a physical machine (not recommended)you need to ensure that winpe has the network driver for that machine. What does smsts.log say when the task sequence is erroring out? It's typically recommended that you build your reference machine on a virtual machine. This limits the hardware in the image, as well as allows you to use snapshots to quickly revert/make changes to the image. If you are building/capturing your image using COnfigMgr, then there isn't an interactive login and it can be difficult to make profile based changes, unless you use scripts to mount the registry hive. With Windows 7, it's recommended to not make many profile changes and instead use group policy to control the "Appearance".

ConfigMgr R3 prestaged media is the recommended method. MDT has a pre/post OEM task sequence, however even the MDT guys recommend that you use R3 prestaged media as it works the correct way. Here is a walkthrough on R3 prestaged media: http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/cnackers/archive/2010/12/11/configuration-manager-r3-prestaged-media-setup-and-walkthrough.aspx You can use any task sequence you want to finalize the machine(s) provided it has the appropriate configuration as show in the guide i linked.