Enable Windows 7 Administrator Account GPO

By default, as was with Vista, the local Administrator account in windows 7 is disabled. If you are deploying Windows 7 across a number of clients on a network etc. you may find the need to enable this account for future trouble shooting client machines. Also remember, even if you enable the Administrator account, and then run Sysprep, the sysprep process disables the Administrator account.
By far the easiest way to enable the Administrator account on client machines in a domain is to use Group Policy, here is how you achieve this.
I am assuming you have the basic understandings of applying/creating Group policy settings on a Windows Domain, if not, leave a comment and i will see how i can help further.
Go ahead and open “Group Policy Management”, for testing purposes, it may be worth creating a new policy on a test OU, and placing some test client accounts within that OU. So Right click your OU and select “Create a GPO in this domain, and Link it here”. The new GPO pox will prompt you for a Name, so go ahead and give it a meaningful Name, and click OK.

Creating a Windows 7 Sysprep unattended XML

Having successfully sysprepped Windows 7, i thought i would break down the processes required into some smaller blogs, so here goes for creating the required unattended XML file.
To create the unattended XML you will need the latest version of WAIK (Windows Automated Installation Kit) and you can download that from the Microsoft Download centre here.
Once you have downloaded and installed WAIK, go ahead and launch Windows System Image manager, and you will be presented with the following

Windows 7 Sysprep and WDS

I decided to try the Sysprep process for windows 7 in advance of our roll-out early next year, to get a feel for the process.
UPDATE: I have added a new Blog Creating a Windows 7 Sysprep unattended XML with a breakdown of the unattended XML creation and configuration.
For the test base image, I want to create an "admin" image with administrative tools, AD, Exchange 2007 and SQL 2005 on 64 BIT Windows, to be used by the sys admins for further testing.

Upon searching, the majority of posts are Vista related, but this step by step guide was found to be very useful, particularly in creating the answer file using the WAIK (Windows Automated Installation Kit), and I would like to take this opportunity to thank Brian Lee jackson.