These laptops won’t be for our business though, we refurbish old laptops/computers and sell them to the community so that they can have something that’s affordable, effective and easy to use.

We don’t get the machines from Dell they are old Dell machines we never buy anything new, we get donations of machines/laptops sometimes in bulk, we use our own free software we recommend on them i.e. Firefox for web browsing foxit reader or adobe reader for pdf viewing, thunderbird for e-mails, open office for documents and either AVG or Avast for anti-virus. We then make the master image and then clone them onto the other machines we got donated on. Saving us time and effort of doing it for all.

We’ve done this for every other bulk machines we’ve got in using Image master, we’ve never had a problem with Avast not starting up the web shield on any of our models at all until we got these laptops. Something about these laptops doesn’t seem to like our regular image writing it seems when using avast.

If it’s the case of needing to do sysprep then so be it, we’ll try that out and hopefully that works with the image master. I undersand about the web protection thing but if the re-install tool doesn’t really work and it has to be sold that way I think it could be alright. I will do my best to try and make sure that it’s on though, thanks for your help and insight on cloning I will keep that open minded in the future.

edit

I’ve just made a very stupid mistake, the hardware manager told me we never installed Avast on the computers we only left the install on them which is why the clones never had a problem, I’m sorry that I bothered you all this time with this problem and I’ve made quite a fool of myself haha, well newbie title is right.

I’ll un-install the anti-virus on the computers using that tool, thanks alot.