Nick White was able to talk to David D’Souza, Director of Development in the Windows Core OS Division at Microsoft, on the improvements of Windows Vista’s installation and deployment as well as implementation of imaging in Vista’s install process.
David explains how imaging is used in Windows Vista (specifically with WIM files which are the Windows Imaging Format).
He also talks about improvements to installation time seen in Windows Vista RC1.
This post is a great one for understanding what has changed in the installation of Windows Vista and how they engineered the setup process to be more efficient for deployment.
My experience with installing Windows Vista has been fantastic since Beta 2. Anything before Beta 2 was horrible. But everything after Beta 2 has gotten better with each new build. As of Build 5728 - full install time (clean-install) for me is less than 30 minutes. However, upgrade install times from XP with applications and settings still seems to be quite a bit longer… almost pushing the 1 hour mark. I prefer clean-installs myself and utilize the Windows Easy Transfer tool quite a bit.
Andre De Costa talks about his installation time with Windows Vista Build 5728. He’s running at 39 minutes. He says that is a improvement over the 42 minutes he got with Build 5600.
I’d love to hear what other folks are getting for install times for Vista - both clean-installs or upgrades!
About Brandon LeBlanc
Microsoft Technology Enthusiast for Windows Vista, Windows Live, and Microsoft Gadgets.
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway.
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My install with Beta Two was generally okay. I didn’t actually get annoyed enough by the installation times to keep track of it.
In other news, I’d like to know what you think of McAfee’s latest FUD campaign to protect their anti-virus/security cash cow: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5399534.stm
Would be great if you could put all the drivers on a usb flash drive and have the OS use them during the install.
On my system, a clean install now takes 20-23 minutes but an upgrade from xp takes almost an hour. This is the same from build 5600 to 5728. Earlier versions took nearly 40 minutes for clean install.
Seems they have some improvement for upgrade times from XP to Vista.
Looks like many folks are getting great clean-install times though!
Just got a copy of RC2, did an upgrade over XP SP2 on a Dell Latitude D505, 1.6Ghz Pentium M, 512MB RAM - started at 9:00am, finished at about 1:00pm - 4 hours. Ouch.
Did a dual boot clean install with RC1 previously, which took about 20 mins. Might almost have been faster if I had done the clean install, then re-installed all my progams.
Man, I’m a sucker for punishment…