Acronis and Sysprep

Do you have to run Micrososft Sysprep on a WinXP or Vista machine prior to using Acronis Home 11 to make a disk image?

If I ever restore an Acronis image the chances are it will be on new hardware.....so I'm assuming that using Sysprep would help ensure the OS driver database is rebuilt during any boot up of a restored image.

 

Using Sysprep in Standard Mode without special modified inf for using addional mass storage drives would give you only the possibility to change the SID and the hostname and some other logical windows settings. The use sysprep for deploying on other mainboards with different chipsets is not possible it will hang up in bluescreen. The only thing sysprep can handle are pnp and special published mass storage drivers which are provided over sysprep.inf
If you want to restore to different mainboard hardware you have to use Universal Restore.

 

newest echo bootcd's(form build 8072) have the option to change the sid after restoring an image ;-)

 

Thanks Monstahund and jeremyotten

This is getting more complicated the more I look into this.

So, if I understand this correctly, I need to get the Workstation Echo product and probably the Universal Restore option also:
http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATICW/
http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATICW/universal-restore.html

Q. Is the restore as easy as Acronis makes it sound on their website or am I going to find out it's as painful as True Image Home 11??

Q. Are their any "gotchas" when restoring WinXP, Vista OEM or Win2003?

One of the reasons for getting True Image Home 11 was because it gave the options to "Exclude files and folders from Image Backup" and "Preserve files/folders during restore", both of which would be useful to me. I have a range of temp directories I use for software builds etc. that I don't need, or want, to be backed up (they're very large). Unfortunately, Workstation Echo doesn't seem to support these features:
http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATICW/comparison.html

Q. Is there any way around this without trying to squeeze in a new partition just for the temp directories?

Thanks for the help