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Windows XP Unattended

Some basic pointers on customizing your unattended Windows XP installation.


Sunday, 2010-03-28 | AlmostEffortless, Careerism

We're finally (and reluctantly) ditching Windows 2000 for Windows XP Pro at the office. It has fallen upon me to put together a custom unattended (http://unattended.sourceforge.net/) solution.

For those who aren't familiar with the concept of an unattended installation, here's the gist:

  1. You're in an environment with mixed hardware that requires all users to have a nearly identical workstation environment.
  2. If you had dozens of identical machines, you'd simply get all your software together, install it on a master machine, configure all of your settings, create an image based on that machine, burn an acronis (http://www.acronis.com/)boot disk or two and start cranking out clones; as this is not an option due to your mixed machinery, you've got to actually install all that software and set all those settings.
  3. To do this, you use a project like unattended, which automates the installation of the OS, all additional software and allows you to run scripts as necessary during the installation of the OS and the additional softs.

So far, so good.

Problems start to arise when you realize that the unattended project's greatest strength is its greatest weakness: it is extremely flexible and customizable because it does everything in the most "vanilla" manner possible and leaves everything beyond the basics of installing your Microsoft OS and ActiveState perl up to you.

How to actually configure an unattended solution is not, however, what I'm here to discuss. What I've got today are some tips and tricks for automating tasks on Windows XP that I've picked up as I work on my own unattended solution. They concern changing the login style, stopping and disabling services and removing Windows Components.

Automatically disabling the "Welcome Screen"

This, for better or for worse, is a simple registry hack. Create a file called, let's say, winXPfixLogon.reg that looks like this: 

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]
"LogonType"=dword:00000000

That "LogonType" dword may not be present by default; adding (or modifying) it will disable the "Welcome Screen" and allow you to use the "classic" logon (i.e. log onto the system with some dignity).

In order to automate this, simply stick a line in a batch file that looks like this:

regedit /s z:\scripts\winXPfixLogon.reg
and you're ready to roll.

Stopping and/or disabling services

There are two Windows command line tools that you can use to quickly stop and disable a service. "wscsvc" is the name of the hyper-annoying "Security Center" (a.k.a. the red-shield of nagging). To stop it and disable it (i.e. prevent it from starting automatically), all you've got to do is holler thus:

net stop wscsvc
sc config wscsvc start= disabled
Pay special attention to the spacing on that one: the single space after the "start=" is apparently make-or-break.

Automatically removing Windows Components

There are few things as genuinely shitty as the cruft and useless/broken software with which Microsoft has chosen to clog their UI. Much of this bloat cannot be completely removed; Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and Windows Media Player are not going anywhere (unless you plan to avail yourself of the substantial and psychotic registry and filesystem hacks that generally won't pass muster at the office).

Those annoying components can, however, be "disabled" or made invisible to users. With a batch line like this:

SYSOCMGR.EXE /i:%windir%\inf\sysoc.inf /u:z:\install\scripts\disabled_components.txt
and a disabled_components.txt that looks like this:
[components]
freecell=off
hearts=off
minesweeper=off
pinball=off
solitaire=off
spider=off
zonegames=off
vol=off
MSNexplr=off
deskpaper=off
OEaccess=off
IEaccess=off
WMPOCM=off
you can "remove" (i.e. sort of disable) a lot of those annoying "components".

In the above excerpt, most of the names are fairly obvious: the last three are, in order, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. Also in that list are the so-called "Internet Games" (zonegames).

Obviously this is just a light scratching of the surface: what I've laid out above is just the beginning of numerous modifications, deletions and emendations required to make Windows XP a functional operating system (apps like daemontools, cwRsync and certain others that partially un-cripple Windows all come to mind).