Question : Problem: Ghostcasting utilizing Norton Ghost 8.0

I am new to asking questions on this board but I frequent it often for assistance with problems I am seeing where I work.  

A little bit of background, I have been somewhat out of the I/T game for the last 5 years pursuing a new line of work.  Recently my new job requested me, because of my background, to take over the job of IT Administrator.  It's a one person job supporting about 100 machines give or take, mostly Gateway 4100, 4300, and 4610, all running Windows XP Pro as well as proprietary software and the usual.  I was left with nothing to start with from my predecessor as he used a HD Duplicator to image machines and took it with him.  So I had to start literally from scratch on how it would be done and teach myself all over again.

My Question is what is the best way to Ghostcast machines?  I was able to get a good laptop and set it up with ghostcast and have been able to image with a Cat6 cable between the computers.  This has worked but at times the connection times out and it is extremely slow (never topping 170M/B / sec wiith a 5GB-7GB image with all our programs on it).  As for the timeout it will happen anywhere from none to multiple times before it works, and the part that gets me always is that nothing was changed.

Is it better to image over a USB to USB connection (Machines don't have 1394 so none of that)?
Is over Cat 6 network connection better machine to machine or through a hub or router?
When I run multicasting will I continue to run into these problems with timeouts and even slower connections for what appears to be no reason?

Another probelm I will address at a different time is the Ghost CD Boot since I don't have a floppy in the 4610's.  I have a workaround right now but its getting to be a pain.

Thanks for anyone's input, I know its old software but I got no choise right now with our limited budget.  Got to make due and learn how to best make use of what I got.

Answer : Problem: Ghostcasting utilizing Norton Ghost 8.0

I use a universal TCPIP boot floppy as an image, modified to handle CDROM also.

http://www.netbootdisk.com/

also see

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f3/norton-ghost-bootable-cd-153755/

This works for all of my machines regardless of NIC, and I have also used the GCROM driver to handle SATA CD drives.