I am researching an option to deliver my product via sysprep.

The product consists of several services (the services I wrote, as well
as SQL Server). I setup the machine and configure the services to run
under the Windows Admin account. I now want to run sysprep and then
duplicate the images and give the boxes to my customers.

The customer powers up the box and I want it to run.

I think I have a few problems here:
1a) When the machine powers up, the user will select a password for
the administrator account. My services won't run because they don't
have the correct credentials, right?
1b) Should I create a new user account for my services and add it to
the administrators group instead? Or is that account going to be dead,
too? After I run sysprep, the user accounts are gone, right?

2) When the machine powers up, the user will select a machine name.
This will not be the same machine name that I used when configuring
SQL. SQL is going to be dead, too, right?

"Turd" <856652@gmail.com> wrote in
news:1140732136.596415.95390@t39g2000cwt.googlegroups.com:

> I think I have a few problems here:
> 1a) When the machine powers up, the user will select a password
> for the administrator account. My services won't run because they
> don't have the correct credentials, right?

If you already created an administrator account and set the password,
the user doesn't have to set the password again during sysprep (i.e.
they can just leave it blank). In fact, from my tests, setting the
administrator password during sysprep has NO effect on changing the
password.

> 1b) Should I create a new user account for my services and add it
> to the administrators group instead? Or is that account going to
> be dead, too? After I run sysprep, the user accounts are gone,
> right?

The profiles might be, but no, the user accounts should stay put.

> 2) When the machine powers up, the user will select a machine
> name. This will not be the same machine name that I used when
> configuring SQL. SQL is going to be dead, too, right?

You can set the computer name in sysprep.inf.

Sounds like a better option may be an installation package for your
product. Then you could dynamically create accounts you would need and
feed in the computer name that user is using.

Adam
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