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Comment by Godel_unicode | Hacker News Reader

You just needed to actually read the documentation and use sysprep (ideally with an unattend file). Just remember to image it before sysprepping since you can only run it a few times. There are a ton of things sysprep does that are really helpful and not handled at all by tools like that.

Microsoft doesn’t care if you clone systems, (why would they?) they care about the volume of help desk tickets created by doing it wrong.

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> You just needed to actually read the documentation and use sysprep [...] There are a ton of things sysprep does that are really helpful

And a lot that are not helpful, iirc. It was probably 10 years ago when I had to deal with this, but my recollection is that Sysprep was messing with a lot of stuff - more than I needed.

> Microsoft doesn’t care if you clone systems, (why would they?)

Lol, licenses, of course. Nowadays they got a bit softer on the issue, but back then they were still very very twitchy about duplicating and virtualizing systems.

We have very different memories, then. The official docs were really good as far back as 2006 or so, they just required you to actually read them. Sysprep was certainly a powerful tool, but if you told it not to generalize and no OoBE, it mostly just reset the SID. Most people I ran into who had issues were using some random poorly written blog posts that were really just content farming for ad money.

Huh? I’ll grant you that Microsoft was picky about being paid for their software, but they produced a ton of tools to support cloning and duplicating. License compliance was handled with audits and CALs, not some weird cabal of anti-imaging.

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