I can only give you some ideas, which are the best leads, all in all, in any environment. You've brought up a lot of disparate issues in your question, training being the foremost and, often times, the most difficult to achieve well. No simple answers.
1) Define the audience - 20 Level 1 helpdesk technicians. Know what the Level 1 helpdesk technicians need to know and why.
2) Define the purpose of the training - the differences between WIN95 and WIN2K are substantial, to say the least. Are you sure that's the focus of your training?
3) "...and other support issues" -- define the "other" support issues before you mention them. No one can read your mind, but you can. Define, outline, then detail.
2)"The support really is only basic hardware/peripheral and simple OS issues on laptops with proprietary software." -- I'd like to use a foul cussword here, but can't. There 's no such thing in the world as "only basic hardware/peripheral and simple OS issues with proprietary software," especially with a group as large and variable as "20 Level 1 helpdesk technicians".
To the point, focus on the exact purpose, as best you can, of what you're trying to do. Remember in elementary school when they taught us to write the firstsentence? And the first sentence was the prelude to the paragraph? And the paragraph combined with the first sentence of the first paragraph to become an introduction of two paragraphs?
Today, there's elementary physics.
Start with basics. Look at your paragraph.
Brainstorm
Outline
Focus
Detail
Deliver
Best of luck,
Mark McDade
