KACE Product Support

My company has a k2000 appliance which we've been using for systems deployment for a few years.  It is running version 3.6.98680.  We are doing scripted installations of Windows 7 x64.  The source media we are using is 5.58 GB and has SP1 and all available Windows updates as of about a week ago slipstreamed into it.  New installations were taking an inordinate amount of time to run Windows update after deploying them so I decided to create the new source media with the slipstreamed updates in it in order to reduce the amount of updating that would need to be done after deployment.  When we changed the source media is when I noticed a big jump in the amount of time it takes to deploy a system.

What I did is put a BAT task at the end of the preinstallation task list which logs the date and time to a log file on the C: drive of the system being deployed and then put another BAT task at the beginning of the postinstallation task list that does the same thing.  Then by subtracting those two dates I can determine how much time is elapsing for what I consider "the O/S installation".  It's just under an hour (58 minutes), which seems like quite a long time for a scripted install to take place.

The k2000 server and client being deployed to both have pretty decent specs.  The network in between is all gigabit and by copying a 500 MB test file from the deployed client back to a samba share on the k2000 box I am fully saturating the gigabit line speed (~100+ MB/s) so I don't think this could be related to the network of the horsepower of the computers.

An hour just seemed like quite a long time for a scripted installation to take place and I was wondering if anyone could weigh in to confirm or deny that.  If it is slow, are there any actions I can take to speed it up?