I stopped trusting those little bootable USB drives from the checkout aisle and it fixed my reimage times
Every tech at my shop in Boise keeps a drawer full of cheap USB drives for Windows installs, and they all ran slower than they should. I finally timed it: a clean install took 41 minutes on one of those $7 drives, but 9 minutes on a decent SSD in a cheap enclosure. The reason is those bargain sticks have terrible write speeds that nobody checks, so you sit there staring at a progress bar blaming the machine. Swapped every tech's drive for a 128GB SSD setup for about $25 a pop and reimages stopped eating my whole afternoon. Anyone else run into this, or did your shop figure it out some other way?
Watched a guy in college spend an hour fighting a Windows 7 install off some free promo stick before we realized it was just a 4GB drive from a trade show. Plugged in an old laptop drive we yanked from a dead machine and it flew.