We have an older medical office that we need to upgrade. It is using XP as a server and several Win2000 boxes as the clients. The practice management software is not compatible with Windows 7. We couldn't upgrade the software nor could we downgrade the new boxes to XP.

I suggest VMWare (my answer for most everything lately) but this time Microsoft's Virtual PC and XP mode came to the rescue. We were able to test and configure the first machine, shut it down, save it to a network share and copy it to the other machines.

We were able to get a shortcut of the XP Mode application on the host's desktop, connect to a network printer and then still get better performance than before.

I still haven't learned to use sysprep but was able to make it work. Thumbs up to Virtual PC.