I scripted away our 20-minute imaging checklist

When I first got to my job, every freshly imaged machine ended with the same twenty minutes of hand work. Battery and power settings, driver downloads, a GPU update, a system file check. Same steps, every machine, done by a person.

Twenty minutes doesn’t sound like much. Now run it against every machine that gets imaged, all year. That’s hundreds of hours of a tech’s time going to a checklist a computer could run.

So I wrote a PowerShell script that runs the whole list: configures the battery settings, pulls down the drivers the machine needs, runs the GPU update, then finishes with the system file check. The things people were doing by hand now just run.

Handing a .ps1 file to a busy tech is a good way to get it ignored, so I ran it through ps2exe and made it an executable the other techs could just double-click.

It didn’t stay mine for long. Other techs picked it up, and eventually it was adopted across the organization, which multiplied one machine’s twenty minutes into hundreds of hours the organization got back.

Imaging was only the start. Most of what I write now is remediation scripts: the vulnerability scanner hands me the list of affected machines, and when a fix exists, I turn it into a script.

Rollout is by deployment rings: one machine, then two, then four, then eight, doubling until the batch is done. Each ring has to come back clean before the next one runs, and that first machine is the canary.

If the canary falls over, I lost a few minutes on one machine instead of a bad afternoon on the whole fleet.