Question : Sysprepping Windows 7 Ultimate

Question on OEM Product keys.  I just got 8 laptops from Lenovo and wanted to customize the OEM Windows 7 Ultimate x64 image, sysprep it, and deploy it back out the other 7 computers.  The process actually went very well, but, after it was finished, someone told me that there are no re-imaging rights for OEM products not in Volume License.  So, I thought I would just change the product key for each machine to its COA product key.  However, there was no "Change Product Key" link.  I used slmgr to find out what each machine had already and saw that the "partial" product key was the same on each.  Used a key finder to get the full key and it was also the same on all system.  This sounded right since they were all imaged from one machine.  So, I restored one of the systems back to factory default using the F11 key.  I then rebooted and got the full product key again and found that it is was still the same.

So, my question is, if all the systems came from the factory with the same OEM product key built into the image, do I even need to worry about changing the product key to match the COA product key on each system?

Answer : Sysprepping Windows 7 Ultimate

verify in the registry that the services in question have a start value of 2

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services
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