In my company we have 8 laptops that we use to deploy on the field. These machines get assigned to a user for a certain time and run Windows Vista. All the machines are the same model.

After the machine is returned, it is company policy to completely format the machine and go back to a predetermined configuration. Right now, what we do is we use the recovery utility in the laptop (we are a small shop so we use the OEM Windows license that the laptops come with) and manually uninstall and change the configuration in order to bring it to our baseline config.

I know that there are ways to create an image that gets copied to the hard drive with a specific configuration and with specific software installed (thats what OEMs do right?).

I'm looking for a tool or a tutorial or something that explains as simply as possible how to create such an image.

Thanks a lot