Thursday, 14 August, 2003

Ghost

In the final stages of my project at work, I had to test an ActiveX control on 16 different platforms ranging from Windows 98 with IE 5.0 to Windows Server 2003 with the latest version of IE.  It's not possible to try testing with every possible combination of Windows and IE with different service pack versions and critical updates, so we limited testing to standard versions with the latest service packs.  Believe me, installing these different versions is a painful process, and I wasn't about to go through that more than once.

Enter Ghost.  What a superb program.  I'd create a Windows/IE platform, re-boot the machine with the Ghost startup disk, and make a full image copy of the hard drive to our Ghost server.  When it came time to do the testing, it took only a few minutes to reboot a machine, locate the proper image on the server, and copy it down.  If you're doing platform testing, get Ghost.  If your time is worth anything at all, you'll easily justify the cost.