The Image Prep Tool is designed to simplify the process of preparing a computer for disk imaging, allowing the operating system and software configuration to become the base on which other computers on the network can be cloned. By moving the resulting image to other computers and repeating the process it is often possible to produce a single 'Master Image File' that can be used on any workstation on the network.

At its most basic level the Image Prep Tool can simply be seen as a wrapper for Microsoft's SysPrep utility. It will simplify the process of running SysPrep and ensure that the resulting preparation process is automated correctly.

Once supplied with the appropriate passwords and license code details the Image Prep Tool will deal with copying the required SysPrep files to the correct location and creating the answer file that will be used after the computer restarts.

This feature alone is useful enough, as it considerably shortens the time taken to create the answer file and avoids the issue of storing it (complete with sensitive network user names and passwords in plain text) somewhere on the network for future use. The only place the answer file should be stored is in the image file itself.

However, the Image Prep tool also offers a number of additional features designed to make the image file as portable as possible and to help reuse an image on computers with hardware specifications that differ considerably from the master computer.