Folk,

This one's a bit unusual.  Have a naval buddy on deployment.  He just got two (2) new laptops a couple of days before the deployment.  Both are 64-bit with Win7 Home Premium.

Acer
AMD Athlon X2 dual Core L310, 1.2 GHz
4 GB RAM (3.75 GB usable)
Atheros AR5B93 Wireless (internal)
Realtek HD Audio
ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics

Gateway (red, btw)
Intel Core i3 M330 2.13 GHz (4 core)
4 GB RAM (3.68 GB usable)
Atheros AR5B93 Wireless (internal)
Broadcom NetLink Gigabit Ethernet (internal)
Intel Display Audio
Realtek HD Audio
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator HD

It has fallen to me to config these boxes while he is away.

The two boxes will be 80% identical insofar as software configuration.

The other 20% will be

• his - electronics, diagramming, & database software - he's the radar/electronics maven on his ship, also breadboards stuff as a hobby.
  
• hers - AutoCAD & games, prolly World of Warcraft - she's a draftsman and a game junky.
  

He'll use the Acer, but he's giving the Gateway to his SO (calls her his

Social Officer  ;D) as a surprise.  He left all the necessaries to install the special stuff, so that's no problem.

However, I don't want to spend a week or two (2) configuring one box, the doing the same thing with the other.

Equally however, I don't think I can do one box, then image it to the other, due to the disparity in CPU and other variations.

So, what do you think would be the best approach?  Is there a fairly reliable way to image dissimilar PCs?  Never ran across this in the corporate world, and I really don't want to learn the hard way if I can avoid it.

I'm using the Gateway right now, and it is [speedy] sweet!  (Although I'm seeing the application whiteout that I thought was just on my desktop - that's prolly another thread, though.)[/list]

Folk,

'Bout a decade and a half ago, PC Magazine published a VB (v3.0, I think) app called inctrl.exe.  It tracked all changes to a PC whenever new software was installed.  It had to be run before and after any given software installation, and was - to me - abominably slow.  But it did find any and all changes made as a result of the tracked installation.  The results could be logged to HTML, and the result reviewed at any later time.  (When I say any and all changes, I mean that it tracked file replacements (e.g., different .dll files), registry changes (both from and to entries, as I recall), new information written to disk, information deleted from disk - or registry, or start menu, or ... - basically, it recorded every single change made on the system.  I even caught a few malware installs in the process of using it.)

I'm trying to find something similar that will work with Win7, preferably both 32- and 64-bit versions - maybe two different app versions, but that won't matter.

The only thing I can find to date is some sort of uninstall software.  Unfortunately, a lot of such software does not create a reader-friendly change log.  And I'm not really looking for uninstall information, per se.  (I'm about to try Total Install - last free version - to see if it will perform to my needs.)

Example.
I've been using Dimio's Task Manager (DTaskManager) for ages.  When I switched to Win7 (32-bit), it quit working - gave an error on startup.  Then something I installed made it start working again.  OK, 1st thought is that some .dll was altered, a different version installed.  Then I installed something else and it started to error out again.  If I had installation tracking logs, I might be able to discern what file was altered that DTaskManager needed to use, and try reverting that file.

There are caveats here, in that the newly installed software might require the version(s) choking DTaskManager, but at least I'd be able to check that, ya know?  Then I'd have to decide which app was more useful to me <groan />.

So, then, I'm not looking for removal capability so much as for any and all changes any given installation makes.

Does that make sense?

Any recommendations?  (BTW, I'm not nearly so concerned with free vs. paid as with functionality:  cost, within reason, is not a significant concern.)

Or, perhaps, a related product?

Looking for something that will update files when a USB stick is inserted.  Needs to synchronize, not just transfer, as there could be multiple, bi-directional changes.  Transfer involves only two boxes at present time, but could be expanded to three, perhaps four.

Cannot use stick as primary storage, since data files may be in use when stick transferred.  Anything functional is going to be kind of a kludge, I'm afraid.

My hope is something that will run upon insert, then alert me if any of the data files are currently in use on that box.

I'm afraid my explanation is kinda cloudy, sorry.