I recently purchased a new 17.3 inch widescreen Toshiba Satellite Pro C70 laptop for a senior academic colleague. The device came pre-installed with Windows 8, but, since the requirement was for Windows 7, I decided to completely rebuild it by injecting it with a new network image via WDS and PXE booting over our fast network. Sounds straightforward, right? Wrong! It took me a while to figure out – and I hope this may help anyone who may be coincidentally having similar problems. First, I needed to access the BIOS. Since I had already booted into Windows 8, I found that the bells and whistles of Windows 8 hibernation features  interfered with BIOS access. I overcame this by pressing and holding the SHIFT key down whilst performing a complete system shut down. Only releasing the SHIFT key on COMPLETE shut down (lights off!).  Next, I held F2 key down whilst booting  to enter the BIOS. Since this is a new laptop, it has the UEFI  (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) boot mode feature, which I needed to change to the legacy CSM (Compatibility Support Module) mode. This was found in Advanced … System Configuration … Boot Mode section of the BIOS.  I saved the changes, again shutting down whilst holding down the SHIFT key. Booting up, I held down the F12 key simultaneously, to enter the Boot Menu. I was then able to pick network (LAN) boot, and successfully PXE network boot to our WDS menu, thereafter choosing the appropriate 64-bit WIndows 7 Enterprise image. Phew! I hope this helps anyone who may find a) problems entering newish Toshiba Satellite BIOSes and b) then finds they cannot PXE boot.

PXE-boots (below) – all the rage at Enterprise outlets these days … 🙂

It’s been a fair while since I last wrote anything, as I have been busy during these summer weeks to catch up and perform some much needed lab maintenance while the students are away. So here’s what I’ve been up to this week . I’ve  been automating the installation of SDL Trados 2011, desktop language translation software, and Multiterm 9, which provides a management database of terminology (a “termbase”), for translations.

The software comes compressed as single exe files which can be uncompressed to discreet directory structures containing all the runtime libraries and msi files, which lend themselves to auto deployment (with a bit of tweaking) via Group Policy (GP). GP administrative templates are also provided which can be used to further tailor the install – specifically, to enable or disable automatic updating. I’ve chosen to disable automatic updating and disallow users the ability to do this, as I want to manage this centrally.

The installation has been done via VBscript within a Group Policy Object (yes, I know Powershell is here, but I’ll stick to what I;m more familiar with – for the moment).

I wrote a script to download copies of the uncompressed installation files from our software server to every local client, do the install, and clean up the local environment later. Here’s a snippet of the code to install a couple of core components:

Set WshShell = CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
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WshShell.Run “msiexec /i C:\SDLTrados2011\SDLTradosStudio2011_SP2_3046\modules\TranslationStudio2.msi /qn /l*v C:\temp\sdltrados.log”,1,true
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C:\SDLTrados2011\SDLMultiTermDesktop2011_SP2_361\modules\MTCore9.msi /qn /l*v C:\temp\sdlmultiterm_core.log CLIENTINSTALL=1″,1,true

The boolean parameter ensures that the run command completes before the script continues to execute.

I’ve tested the install in one of our digital language labs, and I plan to deploy the software to all five labs before our students return. I may also need to put this on most of our Language Resource Centre cluster machines.

 Postscript: Since my time of writing the original article, The Trados and Multtiterm Software has now been been successfully deployed to every language lab. in our School.