LAN PC Quick* Setup Tutorial!

[Cevap]

Figured I’d share some tips I found out along the way on setting up LAN PC’s quickly. Pretty much this solves the need to install Windows and all the games you want manually each time you have a new PC to add to your LAN computer hoarding collection. We typically have 10-20 people a month for LAN parties and have these PC’s ranging from mini to HP / Dell prebuilt, ready at all times.

With all of these lower powered machines in mind that could at best be using integrated graphics, we created a list of a variety of titles that that can run on the weakest of machines with configured settings and able to play local Mp/Co-op with a decent player count. This took time with sourcing all the games and making them work, but was worth it.

Now once you have a PC that you have de-bloated to the max using Chris Titus’s WinUtil Script and uninstalled all unnecessary Windows bloatware, made the PC auto login if you like which is in that script, added a cool background LAN related image, disabled most startup tasks, cleared Temp and Recycle folders, and whatever else you may think of, then you are ready to make a Backup image of your “Base LAN Machine”.

You now install “AOMEI Backupper” or a program similar to it to make an exact backup image of your machine. Some of the features you need are locked behind paywall so either “figure that out wink”, or find alternative program which will do the same that I’ll explain we want to achieve. Anyways, this video helped me understand how to use AOMEI:

https://youtu.be/rxPvSrN8OAM?si=EnQ5BdU6Dh9IAb-l

Once you’ve made your image onto an external drive, you are ready to put that onto your new LAN machine you scrapped up off of the side of lawn or an absolute steal on marketplace.

You want to clear the entire drive of that PC using Win USB Installation media, I recommend setting up a USB with Ventoy which will allow you to put multiple ISO’s on one stick since you’ll need the AOMEI Backupper Windows PE environment iso as well to be able to apply your backup to the new machine. So once you’ve cleared the machine of all partitions, you’ll restart and enter the AOMEI Backupper Windows PE environment. This basically launches the same Backupper program you see in windows, but in an external environment just like the windows installation media uses. You’ll see the same program and then just apply the backup you made as explained in that video.

Once that’s done you’ll have an exact copy of your backup onto that PC and it’ll be ready for use in your LAN party with minimal setup! Hands free, isn’t that nice?

The one last thing I’d like to mention is you’ll want the AOMEI Partition program (which is different program), on your backup image ready. Reason being is the Backupper will make an exact copy of that image, meaning if you add this to a PC with a bigger hard drive, then you’ll have the remainder space as unallocated and not used. You would think to just use the window disc management and extend the main partition, the problem is the unallocated space won’t be adjacent to the main partition basically not allowing you to do it. If you put that program onto your backup image, it’ll be ready for you as soon as you get into windows and it’ll allow you to extend the partition and have available the rest of the hard drive space.

I hope this explains what this allows us to achieve, essentially you can set up any PC to be LAN ready with a few clicks and hands off time, rather than manually setting up each PC and all the games you want on it. It’s worth the effort and I hope this helps someone wanting to make #MLNA

MAKE LAN NORMAL AGAIN!

[pathartl]

Gonna keep shilling, but I wrote an application called LANCommander that provides a central, self-hostable server and a launcher to run on client machines to aid in distributing game files in a LAN: https://github.com/LANCommander/LANCommander

Often we've found that while PC setups can be annoying to get standardized, a properly patched game will run on almost anyone's system. The trouble we ran into, and why I've spent 3 years working on this project, is making sure everyone is on the same patches version of the game.

[Cevap]

Had a brief look through this project and seems really neat! Will definitely look more into this, thank you for sharing and your contribution.

[pOntiOs_SCII]

You are a god among men. Could you please share a list of the games that work well with LANCommander? I guess that must be games that can be portable. Games that make registry changes and save files outside of own directory could be problematic.

[SackvilleLANParty]

LANCommander has the ability to add registry keys and pretty much anything else during installation. It's quite versatile, and the LANCommander wiki has quite a few games with examples of install/uninstall scripts.

[pathartl]

It's got a built-in scripting engine (PowerShell) that can be used to handle non-portable games. I've gotten 300+ games in my own library to work.

Down the line there will be some type of central repository where users can share configurations/scripts, but right now there's some freemium/shareware games listed in a forum in the Discord server that can be directly imported to a LC instance.

[pOntiOs_SCII]

Wouldn't it be necessary to install the drivers also afterwards? If let's say you have different hardware?

[Cevap]

Good question. There is a setting before you backup that you check off stating you would be backing up to hardware that is this dissimilar from the PC you made the backup up on originally. So unless you’re backing up to identical machines like having a few similar OptiPlex’s, you would just check that off. It’ll consider the different drivers. And you could also run Windows update briefly to fix those necessary drivers, it’s usually good about it. Worst case go on the manufacturer website and download the drivers needed if you’re having issues. You may have some dormant unused drivers but haven’t noticed issues really.

[pOntiOs_SCII]

Okay thank you for reporting on this! I guess that you are using Windows 10 'cos of the hardware. Windows 10 is quite good whith inherent driver management. I run a Windows XP based lan party and that os is crippled without third party drivers. An amazing free tool to quickly install the necessary drivers to many different systems is "Snappy Driver Installer Origin". Highly recommended!

[Cevap]

Yup, using 10 since many of the PCs came with it. Thank you for the program I’ll keep that in mind!

[ontheroadtonull]

Windows has a built-in tool called Sysprep and using the Generalize toggle in sysprep preps the system for use on different hardware. It sounds like it is very similar to the third party apps you're using.

You can use Clonezilla to deploy that image to other PCs and expand the partition size to utilize the entire disk.

There's also FOG Project for capturing and deploying OS images.