Hi all,

I handle operations for a small organization. I'm not an IT pro, but I manage the laptops and tablets, among other things. Some of our laptops are at the end of their duty cycle, and I need to replace them. I am looking for an easy way to configure the new laptops.

In the past, I have just ordered Win7 based machines from a manufacturer, configured one of them as a reference machine, and used Clonezilla to create an image of the reference machine and deploy it to the remaining machines. This is very easy to do and has never been problematic, so I'd like to continue to do this.

I've been googling around a bit to see if this method will work with Windows 8.1, and I'm finding a lot of conflicting information about product activation and deploying images under different types of licenses.

Questions:

- Will this method work with Windows 8.1, or will the machines with the cloned images fail to activate?

- If the machines do fail to activate automatically, can I do phone activation?

- Is this method even allowed under the license? If This is not allowed, what should I do instead?

Yes, there are conflicting information in web. I shall suggest you to ask the same to official site or forum of  clonezilla http://clonezilla.org/

Try phone activation, incase if you have any Windows Activation problem after cloning.

a. Press Windows key + X then click Run, then type: slui.exe 4.

b. Next press the 'ENTER' key.

c. Select your 'Country' from the list.

d. Choose the 'Phone Activation' option.

Regarding licensing ask any Microsoft Customer Care personnel by calling to the Toll Free Number of your country's Microsoft office.  

Hi,

MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit) is recommended for Windows 8.1 deployment, here is a guidance for best practice for deployment Windows 8.1 with the MDT.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hh974336.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn744280.aspx

However, since you also mentioned that you are in a small organization, depending on the scale, if you do not intend to use volume license, we also could consider that using high touch with Standard Image or Retail Media.

Regards,

D. Wu