Question : Alternative to sysprep on windows 7 home premium

Hi,

I have 4 laptops that came with Windows Vista and the free upgrade to Windows 7.  As recommended by HP I ran an upgrade rather than a fresh install to maintain all of the HP software that comes as standard on the machines etc...  After doing this on one machine the plan was to run sysprep take an image of the machine and then run up the 3 other notebooks off of the same image and change the product keys accordingly.

The problem is that because I ran the upgrade rather than do a fresh install I get the following message when trying to run Sysprep under c:\windows\system32\sysprep.

"Sysprep cannot run on a computer that has been upgraded to a new version of windows.  You can only run sysprep on a clean (custom) installation of Windows."

I don't particularly want to go back and install a fresh copy of windows, but I don't particularly want to run up all 4 machines up individually either.  To cut a long story short I was wondering if someone had a suggestion with regards to what I could possibly do next.  I also want to be able to restore any of the machines as required from the one image down the track.

If anyone has a good suggestion it would be appreciated.  I need to get these sorted by Dec 24th for the obvious reason.

Thanks.

Answer : Alternative to sysprep on windows 7 home premium

Hi.
Simply clone this machine onto the others. Sysprep is not required at all because no domain is used. Simply change the name and try to activate - the activation wizard will let you change the product key.