Piles and piles of Dell drivers
For those of you who attended my driver management sessions at MMS 2009 and TechEd 2009 US, you know that Dell is planning to provide CAB files for many of their machines, starting with the corporate laptop models. These are “raw” drivers, provided in a CAB file that saves you the hassle of trying to figure out how to download and extract the contents of dozens of different packages for each model. Now, one CAB file contains all the files you need, just extract the contents of the CAB and import them into your driver repository of choice (MDT 2008, MDT 2010, ConfigMgr, WDS R2, etc.).
See http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/Dell+Business+Client+Operating+System+Deployment+-+The+.CAB+Files for the list of models that now have CAB files posted (there are quite a few).
Once MDT 2010 Beta 2 comes out, you won’t even need to extract the contents of the CAB files. Deployment Workbench will automatically extract the CAB file contents into a temporary folder and then import each driver that it finds.
