At 16.33 2005.02.09 -0600, you wrote:
>Through various machinations of those above me, I have recently
>been "reassigned" (really just had half of my time reallocated), and
>I am now responsible for a small "mobile lab" of 16 notebook PCs
>(Dells).  This is a little outside my normal realm of experience, but
>well within my capabilities.  General uses are for administering an
>exam, teaching the usage of a specialized program, or providing
>interactive documentation for a laboratory procedure.
>
>This is the first time I've ever had this kind of control over a group
>of computers that didn't belong to specific people.  I'm wondering
>if anyone can recommend a good method whereby I can alter the
>contents of one of them (Windows updates, antivirus updates, 
>the addition of programs, placing files on the desktop, etc.) and
>have the changes propagate automagically onto the other 15.
>
>They are all identical Dell D505s, which poses a small problem
>in that Dell's network drivers do not play well with others.  This
>makes doing this over a network difficult.  I really don't want to
>burn three or five CDs (or even a DVD or two) for every little
>change I make, but it wouldn't be a terrible inconvenience to, say,
>connect a USB external hard drive, boot to it, and load an image
>onto the laptop.  After all, I could be elsewhere while the image
>loads then.
>
>So, does anyone have any sage advice on this matter?

A side note: if you clone the same NT-based OS in all the PC's,
beware of SID related problems, which can be significative on a
network. Check sysinternals' NewSid utility.

About your original problem, sure there are better options (like
Active Directory), but I don't trust them too much honestly. I
have a similar problem, and what *I* personally do is keeping in
sync all computers using the archive flag, thus extract the files
that were modified, and then copy them to all the targets, and
clear the archive flags again.
Works perfectly as long as I don't rename/move a file, in which
case the old one would still remain in the target computers. But
since in my application this doesn't happen, I'm happy using this
method.

This is the BACKUP.BAT file I use:

@ECHO OFF
XCOPY %1 %2 /M /S /C /I /H /R /Y

Use it like this:
BACKUP D:\Dir E:\ToBeExported

This will copy all the files in D:\Dir (and subdirs) that have
the archive flag set (i.e. that were modified since the last
time, so to speak) to E:\ToBeExported .. so that you then have
in the latter all the files that need to be copied in the other
PC's own D:\Dir

Only defect I can think of (besides the move/rename explained
above) is that XCOPY doesn't copy empty dirs.. or I haven't
found a way to force it doing so without messing some other
thing.

Bye,
ThePicMan

-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist