How important is it to change the SID?

A couple of things here.  If you are running OEM licenses, you technically cannot just take an image off of one machine and place it on another.  In doing that, you are breaching the EULA as the specific license (product key) is tied to the hardware it was purchased with and is non-transferrable.  What you are doing is using the same product key over and over and over.

That being said, if you are against using sysprep or wish to continue doing it this way, you can either still use ghostwalk (just have to copy the command and execute it in a script, or you can use a sysinternal product (now owned by MS) called newsid.exe.

I would suggest that you download the latest sysprep and run through the wizard and read the documentation on M$'s website.

Well I see that SIDGen.exe is still part of Altiris Deployment Solution 6.9 but they do not recommend using that.   I have not tried if that will work on our XP SP3 clients.   I do not think GhostWalk will work anymore as ghost is no longer the imaging engine with our Altiris Deployment Solution setup.

As far as the OEM Licensing goes I kind of ran through that with Dell and Microsoft a few years ago.   Basically I was told as long as I use the Dell supplied OEM CD to install Windows and the Computer is licensed for that version of Windows I am good to go when it comes to imaging them.   All of our computers are OEM XP licensed from Dell and our newer ones from the past couple years are VIsta Licensed with XP downgrade rights.

I have downloaded the latest Deploy.cab for Windows XP SP3 and I came across this Technet article here that talks about sysprep and OEM licensing.  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457078.aspx.    I just want this to be simple because some of the people that will be making the images and using Altiris to manage our Dell clients are not going to be able to follow this unless I can make it easy.

You can still use sysprep even though you don't have a volume license key. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299840 You would simply need to type it in the first time the machine is booted up. newsid.exe works good also to just change the SID. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897418.aspx there are command line options to script it if you want. good luck.

Moving forward, DS includes GIF (Ghost Imaging Foundation) and ghostwalker is included in GIF.  If you look in the DS 6.9 installation directory, you will see that several Ghost tools have been included.  At the time DS 6.9 shipped, GIF was not yet finalized, so DS 6.9 only includes a subset of GIF.  DS 7.0 includes the full GIF, and I believe it is Symantec's intent that GIF be available for DS 6.9 as well.  However, you should check with DS support to get the difinitive answer from the Product Management team.

About sysprep and Vista.  Each major windows release comes with it's own sysprep.  There were several major changes to sysprep for Vista/Server 2008, so you will definately need to use the new one.  DS supports different versions of sysprep for the different OS versions.

P.S.  If you want to score points with DS support, just make sure they know you are transitioning from GSS to DS.

The machines need unique SID's or you will have machine account problems with the domain most likely. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457078.aspx is your answer for preserving activation. The OEM's will have different SID's from the factory. Are you wanting to use an OEM machine as the base for an image? I am not sure that is supported if you read this: http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/7/7/17745e4a-5d31-4de4-a416-07c646336d94/reimaging.doc

Thank You Brandon,

   Well I know that NewSID still works with XP SP3 and that is the OS that we will be using on almost all of our systems next year as we are going to try to go to Windows 7 in 2010.   As far as imaging OEM OSes I was told by Dell and Microsoft in a conference call years ago that as long as we use the OEM CD to install the OS to make the image and we do not use an OEM CD of an OS the computer didn't come with we are OK.   Basically all of our systems that we use in production are licensed for OEM XP Pro with the ones from the last couple years being licensed for XP Pro and Vista under the downgrade rights option.

Anyone got any tips on how to script out NewSID in a DS task to perform this SID Change?

Command line is:

newsid /a [newcomputername]

This will cause the computer to change it's SID and computername and then reboot if it is successful. 

So basically I can make a software delivery/distribute software task and use "/a" in the command line switches field and that will make it totally automated?

I can then use a configure task to change the name and join it to the domain.

Am I following this correctly?

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897418.aspx