To sysprep or not to sysprep, why are we still having this conversation?

Going way back into the time machine, there were third-party utilities like GhostWalker (remember Ghost?) and NewSID (from Sysinternals) that could prepare Windows for imaging. Eventually, Microsoft said you must use Sysprep, as that s the only supported way to prepare an OS for duplication. That should be the end of the story right? Not quite. [ ]