The new computers have been installed in the Bridge Room computer lab. The parts to build the two remaining computers have been ordered and should arrive by Tuesday. The only snag has been that the ASUS mainboards audio does not work and there is no fix currently. ASUS suggested that I purchase eight (8) ASUS sound cards at about $30 each to fix the problem of their on-board audio not working. It is a hardware problem as it works neither in Windows 10 nor in Linux Mint/MATE 17.3.
With volume licensing it is a snap to image the SSDs (instead of mechanical Fixed Disks): make one perfect computer, then use the Linux dd command to clone to all the other disks — you can plug one SATA blank disk into each unused slot on your desktop computer for cloning. You can’t do this kind of cloning with retail licensing unless you have not already entered the license key information (the computer does check with Microsoft’s server to verify hardware information and prevent stealing) because each license key must be individually entered.
In example, if you have six slots available, you can give Linux commands such as these and come back in a few minutes to take your new SSDs out of the cloning machine and install each one in its own PC. Just change the computer / network name, and you are good to go.
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512 & dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc bs=512 & dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdd bs=512 & dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sde bs=512 & dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdf bs=512 &
When the drives have all been cloned, shut down the computer and boot up with just one drive connected, change the computer’s name appropriately, label the drive with a piece of masking tape, and go insert it into its workstation.