It's better to do the whole installation without network.
When I'm setting up for myself yes. This weekend I set up a new (i.e. recycled) laptop for a new temp member of staff. I fired up the old laptop, attached it to the microsoft account and signed in with my admin password. Next I created her user account and assigned her to the appropriate groups. Jumped over to the Intune console and assigned the machine to a couple of groups. Then I brought up the machine and clicked
Fresh Start. Total time invested around 5 minutes. I don't get paid for this and setting up exactly the same config many times for multiple users is no fun. When she's done it's one click to kill off her access to everything and another to disable the machine.
She can now use any machine in the office and has a fully functional, secure and configured laptop to work from home. No testing needed because I know it works and the admin console reported success. All of this took me less than 2 weeks to setup part time as a non-IT pro, albeit one who is vaguely computer literate.
It also means for my VMs I can constantly run on the 30 days grace period for Windows as it takes minutes to deploy a new one and I don't even need to know its a new machine. Hmmm maybe I should script that to just happens every 28 days
Another way to help with some bloat is to select to not look for updates early in the install of Windows 10 and 11.
The joy of the world we live in is that cyber insurance is a huge chunk out of the IT budget - especially if you are a law firm. Miss a critical patch and you're not covered, and our systems are regularly monitored and audited. Yes some of the stuff they push down is annoying but Microsoft have got pretty good at not screwing things up, and when they do they fix it quickly.
I agree that 16 gig ram has "slightly" shrunk in the last few years. And has become the bare basic.
You're right about that. Laptop now chugs along nicely - this is with everything I typically have open in the work day. AVD on the two external monitors and my own laptop on its own screen. The bottleneck is the AVD but that's not in my control - and no different on the fast desktop. The good thing about the virtual desktop is it makes no difference to my machine, no matter how hard I am pushing it. In the office we just have a cupboard full of low spec chromebooks on charge. Just pick one up and swap it when the battery runs out half way through the day
Fire up the VM and things still slow to a crawl. But if I am at home its only a short walk to the desktop if I need to do anything complex, and if I'm in a hotel room somewhere its better than nowt.
Loll....
(<20 seconds to login screen)
