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How is Universal Deploy necessary for Windows 7?

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Someone correct me if I'm wrong or if I'm missing something but doesn't Windows 7 kind of make UD unnecessary? Since Vista, and then expanded in 7, Windows has been HAL independent. I've read that you can create your goldmaster system (OS, updates, software, settings), take a .wim image of it using imagex from Microsoft, throw it on a completely different piece of hardware, and it will work fine. Granted you will have to install any special drivers for hw that Windows doesn't understand but it would be no different than installing Windows.

I don't understand why UD is still an extra add-on in Snap unless you are using it for XP. I am going to test pulling a Snap image off one model with 7 and deploying it to a different model. Anyone else test this?

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Hello Tyler,

Thank you for posting and welcome to the forum. I will definitely assist you.

From my experience with Acronis Snap Deploy 3, Windows 7 is indeed more "new hardware tolerant". That is, most of the times you can deploy an image to new hardware without using Acronis Universal Deploy.

Just in case however, there can still be situations with specific RAID controllers for example, that will require using AUD and the appropriate drivers.

If you have additional questions, please let me know.

Thank you.