Abstract

Global advances in Information Technology (IT) have led to the adoption of computer systems in organizations and institutions alike all over the world. This trend has led to the introduction of many computer applications and softwares that are mearnt to perform specific tasks so long they are supported by the Operating Systems (OSs) installed in Personal Computers (PCs). It is however important to note that these applications and associated softwares are released in different versions and may also come with different add-ons as per different versions and upgrades. This requires that we continuously upgrade our computers and associated systems so that they become compatible with new versions of different softwares that are released almost each and every single day. Some computers might actually crash, thereby requiring re-installment of all applications there-on before we assume a system restore point. Continuous upgrade and maintenance of such computers and their systems is imminent. However, for a large institution that may possess thousands of PCs in their system, it might be difficult to perform PC by PC upgrade and maintenance. We can therefore create ghosting images for windows and open source platforms. Ghosting a computer basically involves making use of a Ghosting Server to copy all the contents of a computer's hard drive including the OS. These would be stored as ghosting images. Thus, for computers that will be sitting on the same sub network with the Ghosting Server as their domain controller, we can then perform an upgrade and maintenance routine on all of them at once. Therefore, the process of ghosting images deployment would provide convenience in performing installations and upgrades for organizations and large institutions in a cost and time effective manner.

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