If you’re an enterprise administrator faced with the prospect of rolling out Windows Vista to hundreds or thousands of desktops around the world, take heart: Microsoft has finally upgraded its deployment tools in dramatic fashion, taking advantage of the componentized architecture of Windows Vista. But these deployment tools aren’t just advantageous to the world’s biggest corporations. If you’re a power user, a tinkerer, or someone who ends up having to reinstall Windows fairly regularly, you might just be interested to discover that Vista’s newfangled deployment tools are going to prove quite enticing to you as well. Here’s what happened. With Windows Vista, Microsoft has completely rearchitected Windows for the first time since, well, Windows 95, breaking the system down to core pieces, called modules, which are as non-dependent on each other as possible.

Before, each version of Windows included a foundational module that was based on the English language. If Microsoft, a PC maker, or an IT administrator wanted to create, say, a French version of Windows, they would have to add the French language on top of Windows. Now, Windows Vista is language independent. The core foundational module of Windows is much smaller as a result, and it will now be easier for Microsoft—and IT administrators— to roll out patches because they won’t need different ones for all of the languages Windows supports. Microsoft also changed Windows Vista to a file-based disk imaging model.

In the past, Windows Setup would spend a lot of time copying thousands of files from the Windows install media (typically a CD) or a network-based file share (when installed by corporations). These file operations were time consuming because each file had to be expanded and copied to a particular directory structure on the fly. With an image-based model, Windows Vista ships as a single image file containing just the most basic components required to get the OS up and running. During installation, Windows Setup simply copies this single image file to the hard drive and then expands it, creating a simple Windows installation.

After that, custom features are added and the OS is installed. Simple. Finally, Microsoft improved its Windows deployment answer file, a text-based file that literally contains the answers to the questions you answer during interactive Setup when you do a clean install, upgrade, or dual-boot. These questions include such things as “What is your product key?” But the beautiful thing is that the answer file can contain answers to questions that aren’t asked during Setup at all. In this way, we can create custom Windows install images that will install a version of Windows Vista that isn’t possible to obtain using just interactive Setup. But wait, there’s more: Even if all you want is a standard Windows install, creating your own answer file is still a good idea, because you can use that file to run what’s called an automated Windows install, where you don’t have to babysit the install process. It literally automates the whole thing.

The key to all of this is something Microsoft calls Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). This free software kit includes a number of tools, including the User State Migration Tool (USMT), for migrating settings from Windows 2000 and XP to Vista; XImage, for editing Vista image files; Windows System Image Manager, for configuring custom Windows Vista images and creating unattended installaton files; and Windows PE (Preinstallation Environment), a simple Windows boot environment designed primarily to bootstrap Windows Vista installation and prepare a disk for the new operating system. As noted earlier, these tools are designed for enterprises, which typically need to roll out Windows Vista to large numbers of PCs in an automated fashion.

But you can use these tools to create custom Vista install images, burn them to blank DVDs using the third-party disk burning software of your choice, and then install the version of Windows Vista you want. Unfortunately, the Windows Vista version of WAIK wasn’t completed in time for this article. But you can find complete instructions for creating custom Windows Vista install DVDs on the SuperSite for Windows.