I'm examining a number of laptop images and among other details I'm looking for Windows OS install date, shutdown etc and I've come across references to Sysprep which is leading me to suspect that these machines were all installed via sysprep in a domain environment.
I'm wondering if anyone has had experience with Sysprep and how it might effect the information in the registry of the local machine regarding it's date of installation.
Windows OS? 😯
There may be differences even in the version of Sysprep used, but certainly there are between (say) XP, Vista, 7 or 8/8.1 and between the zillion SKU's (whatever is a SKU, like OEM, SLC enabled, Retail, VLK etc.) .
Assuming (as an example) Windows 7, this is a detailed enough guide to the process
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as you can see there are a numbers of options or if you prefer possible bifurcations, so it is hard to say which particular artefacts are created during deployment with the one (or the other) method.
The good news being that the good MS guys like a lot to re-use code, so this article
https://
still applies (at least up to 7 or MDT2010), and the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\Setup\CloneTag still holds the date the image was prepared, see also
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jaclaz