First things first-if you value your system at all, BACK IT UP before you do this, to a place NOT on the same drive. Sysprep works, but if you get it wrong..well..it can cock it up big style.
This is why I count myself lucky. At work, we already have a tried and trusted sysprep’d XP setup ready to roll if I mess up. If I render a machine non-startable, it’s a mere 4 minute job to reinstall it to a “basic” setup. I’d be wary in the extreme about syspreping my system if I had loads of documents/files on it. Straight after a fresh install, before you actually put any files on it is the best time to do this.
I’m still rather new at this-I’m not going to say I have all the answers. All I can say is I’ll try to be as accurate as possible, from experience.
Laptops.
The image we use on desktop PC’s at work sometimes doesn’t work on laptops. Laptops are quite..special little beasts, and can be quirky comapred to their desktop counterparts. If you want to create an image for desktops and laptops, make sure you test it to ensure it works with both!
ACPI/APM power management issues.
We get “image revisions” occasionally, and find that while their predecessor worked on all machines, the new one won’t start on some PC’s at all, while working fine on others. For instance, the “new” ACPI work build works fine on my Dell Optiplex GX60, yet it won’t start at all on an older Pentium 3.
Investigation into this revealed that the problem *seems* to lie in the fact that when the “master” image was made, it was made on a PC that WinXP Identified in the “Computer” section of “Device manager” as an “ACPI Uniprocessor PC”. The old image only identified the PC as “Standard PC”.
Now, ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) and APM (Advanced Power Management) standards have been around for a while, but it appears that some machines adhere to those standards less stringently than others. The ACPI work image would work fine on new Dell PC’s, and PC’s less than 12-18 months old, but would baulk at machines and some laptops that were either older, or not as “standards compliant”.
The solution we’ve found removes some of the “frills”, like the “shutdown on power button push” capability, but for most machines, this is a worthwhile tradeoff for a 100% compatible image.