Your company plans to roll out Windows 11 Pro to 150 identical laptops that are currently blank. The IT team has already built a fully patched reference installation, captured it as a .wim file, and placed it on the Windows Deployment Services (WDS) server. They want each technician to power on a laptop, press F12, and have the operating system load from the network with minimal manual steps. Which installation approach meets these requirements?
Boot from the Windows 11 DVD and run a clean install wizard
PXE-boot into WDS and deploy the captured image to each laptop
Perform an in-place upgrade using a bootable USB flash drive
Use Windows Autopilot dynamic provisioning over the internet
Pre-staging a reference .wim on a Windows Deployment Services server and having clients PXE-boot to it is an image deployment solution. When a technician presses F12 the device uses PXE to contact WDS, downloads Windows PE, and receives the captured image, automating the install with little interaction. An in-place upgrade requires an existing OS, which the blank laptops lack. Autopilot can configure devices but still needs a factory image of Windows on the disk and depends on cloud enrollment, not a local .wim. Booting from DVD invokes a manual clean install on every unit and does not leverage the prepared image or network automation. Therefore, PXE deployment from WDS best fulfills the scenario.
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