I have 23 Dell Desktops, and about 8 laptops. I needed a solution to wipe and reload the systems as quick as possible. I did some testing and the best free cloning software I found was PING. PING is modeled after Norton Ghost and will allow you to put the images onto a network file server or a local partition.
Once I had PING down, I moved onto the network system . Since PING is capable of booting the computers through PXE, I wouldn’t need to burn any CDs or DVDs. It even allows you to script the image creation or restoration. Since the image creation was a one shot deal for me I just did it manually.
So in the end, I ended up having a linux server with TFTP and DHCP for the PXE and NFS for image storage. It took the Dell D800 image 4 minutes to restore from boot to shutdown. A heck of a lot better then the 1.5 hours it took me to put on XP and all the drivers.