Updating Windows 2000 Professional Device Drivers

[greazelns]

I am trying to update the device drivers in Windows 2000 Professional and the only way that I have been able to do this requires manual steps.

In Windows 95 you could remove the ENUM key for the device, drop down the new drivers onto the system, reboot and Windows 95 Plug-n-Play would redetect the device and install the new drivers. This does not work in Windows 2000 because the ENUM key is "locked".

The reason it cannot have manual steps is I will use this process to update over 80,000 machines.

Does anyone know of an automated way to update the device drivers on a Windows 2000 Professional workstation?

 

[mofo888]

holy cow! you're not joking, 80000 machines??!?!

too bad you can't reinstall all of them, that will be much
easily with a "unattended" script file. -- or even ghost.

 

[greazelns]

We have a entire process to setup these machines. We do as Microsoft says and create a master image (based on the HAL) using Sysprep and Ghost. My problem is updating existing Windows 2000 Professional workstations in an environment that does not use Active Directory.

Microsoft told me to use SMS but that is not an option because these are not desktops but laptops used by people not always in the office.

An example of my problem is: We have an IBM X20 laptop out in our enviroment. The IBM X21 becomes available and it has a new video driver that both laptops use. I want to update the IBM X20s that are already out in our environment with the newest drivers and I need to do it in an automated way so that our end users have to do nothing, not even click a button or say "Yes/OK". Microsoft does not have a tool nor method for doing this.

I tried to use .MSI installs to "install" the updated driver but even that did not work. I also can't use a "SendKeys" or AutoIt tool because we have tens of thousands of users that have Multi-Language Interface's installed and those tools don't work unless you write them in the end users language.

I am just check to see if anyone has a way around my problem.