Inside Vista's Image-Based Install Process

KrispyGlider writes "Vista's installation process is dramatically different from any previous version of Windows: rather than being an 'installer,' the install DVD is actually a preinstalled copy of Windows that simply gets decompressed onto your PC. It is hardware agnostic, so it can adjust to different systems, and you can also install your own apps into it so that your Vista install becomes a full system image install. APCMag.com has published an interview with a Microsoft Australia tech specialist on the inner workings of it as well as a story that looks at some of the pros and cons of image-based installs."

dual boot?

This reminds me of other Microsoft installs I've done over the years, and it smacks of such disdain for the rest of the OS universe. Nowhere in the article, nor can I find evidence anywhere else is there an accomodation for an install where XP is just another OS. I remember my first experience with this, when I installed a Win98 on a linux box, and not only did Win98 not offer a dual boot, it (seemingly) gladly removed my linux MBR and formatted my partition without asking if it was okay, and without saying it had done so. That was quite a surprise.

Does anyone know if there is a way to do this? (Though, knowing XP can point to more than one OS to boot, I'm guessing Microsoft is more gentle if there is a pre-existing Windows OS there.)

I've googled for dual boot information, it looks to be similar to what I already know -- it's easier to set up a dual boot machine on a pre-existing Windows machine.

Re:dual boot?

I've had installs of Linux remove my Windows MBR and force grub as the default, its not just windows

Re:dual boot?

Windows users [like me] just don't run Linux, e.g. not an issue.

Re:dual boot?

Windows users [like me] just don't run Linux, e.g. not an issue.

Mac users [like me] just can't fathom why anyone would want to run anything else; i.e. not an issue.

Grammar fascist time. Now, you didn't make the original mistake, but you perpetuated it, and now you're on my "bad" list. (Snakes in your stocking this year, boy, and I'm not talking about the kind you hang over the fireplace.) "E.g." means "for example," and "i.e." means "in other words." (Translated, of course.) The way I remember is to consider how stupid I'd sound using it wrongly.

Okay, not really. Mentally substitute "for egzample" whenever you use "e.g." to see if it works.

I've also got a great mnemonic device that involves skinning purple hamsters for remembering how to use "who" and "whom" correctly if anyone is interested.

Re:dual boot?

"Dual booting is for people who can't really decide why they bought a PC in the first place."
And generalizations are for people who can't see uses for things outside of their own realm...

Re:dual boot?

Tell me how to get 10.4 on my iMac G3 266 MHz without doing arcane things then.

1.: Purchase Mac Mini
2.: Place Mac Mini on top of iMac.

Re:dual boot?

The thing is that unlike the Windows' MBR, grub can actually be configured to run the other OS if the user wants. Most distros autodetect and add the appropriate configs, so that there's zero effort needed.

Installing Windows just nukes the existing MBR and the only thing you can do is run Windows, or start searching for a rescue cd/floppy.

Re:dual boot?

Booting another OS from the NT boot loader is significantly more difficult than using a Linux boot loader GUI setup tool.

Why would you expect any different, not just from microsoft but from ANY company out to make money? Why make it easier to use your competitors' products?

Does your Ford come with an instructon book to tell you how to fit a Nissan engine? No it doesn't because there's no good business case for them to do that.

Conversely the kit car you built from parts probably can be adapted to take ford or nissan engines.Why? because the reason you get a kit car is the joy of building it, not which company sold it to you

Comparing Microsoft OS and Linux and saying who's is like asking who would win in fight between Darth Vader and Capt Picard.
Essentially pointless because they live in different universes.

Re:dual boot?

Why would you expect any different, not just from microsoft but from ANY company out to make money?

Because the idea that dual-boot somehow causes them to lose money is a false one. They already sold you a copy of Windows, by making it difficult to use that alongside another OS, what are they expecting to acheive? Selling you two copies of Windows to satisfy your dual-boot urge?

Clearly their only motivation is to be anti-competitive, which is what one expects from a convicted monopolist.

Re:dual boot?

Comparing Microsoft OS and Linux and saying who's is like asking who would win in fight between Darth Vader and Capt Picard. Essentially pointless because they live in different universes.

Same universe, different galaxies, different time periods, actually. Get your sci-fi right! This is slashdot!

Re:dual boot?

frankly im waiting for someone to give me the ability to "Alt Tab" between OSs. i'd love to run linux primary and just alt tab to windows when i need to do MS shit.

Have you tried VMWare (or any other virtualization system)?

Re:dual boot?

frankly im waiting for someone to give me the ability to "Alt Tab" between OSs. i'd love to run linux primary and just alt tab to windows when i need to do MS shit.

Have you tried VMWare (or any other virtualization system)?

MMM yes but no...

There is something interesting in what GP wrote. Of course virtualization exists but I think it would be quite interesting to have some kind of BIOS program that allowed you to change OS whenever you pressed a predetermined key combo.

How to achieve this?, well I think the "hibernation" faccilities of current Operating systems will do the trick. What should happen is that, when you turn on your computer you boot in whatever OS you had, then when you press the supposed ALT+TAB shortcut the BIOS function sends the current system to hibernate (saves RAM to HD file, etc , etc) and boots the second OS. Then, if you press ALT+TAB again the same process will be done but instead of booting the computer will just restore the state from the hibernation file.

It may seem something difficult but I think that will be way cool and unlike virtualization solutions you will not have any performance loss due to the software overhead (I am proposing some kind of software interrput which the guest OSs will call when the user presses the hotkey).

Now that I think of it, please forget what I said, I am going directly to the USPTO :)

Re:dual boot?

I love reading comments from people who know just enough to post a smug put-down, but not quite enough to explain cogently why something is a silly idea.

Re:dual boot?

The new duo core CPUs have facilities for this. See Parallels [parallels.com] for the first signs of alt tab'ing between OS'es.

In addition rumor has it that Leopard (the next version of OS X) will have something like this built in.

Re:dual boot?

You can format, delete, or leave anoutched any partitions you want. becisally the same as in Windows XP, except they added GUI to that, and also you can't format into FAT32, it must NTFS from now on. As far as Boot Sectors go, I think Vista still does not give you any choices...

Re:dual boot?

Just to play Devil's Advocate here, but why SHOULD they facilitate the use of other OS'es? Look at the customers who make up 99% of their base:

1. Home users who buy a machine with Windows pre installed. No worries about dual boot here.
2. Corporate users who load a custom Windows image on new machines. No worries about dual boot here either.

ALSO, if it really is just an image it would be a simple matter to just load it onto a partition then setup dual boot using GRUB. Anyone who feels they NEED dual boot probably already knows how to do it. Most modern Linux distros do a pretty good job of it for newbs too.

Very very very few people NEED dual boot. Some do. Most do not. From Microsoft's point of view, why should they facilitate it when the people who really NEED it (i.e. developers) will have no problem either setting up dual boot or using virtualization?

Re: Appeal to Common Practice?

Just to play Devil's Advocate here, but why SHOULD they facilitate the use of other OS'es? Look at the customers who make up 99% of their base:

In logical terms this is a fallacy known as an Appeal to Common Practice.
If Linux distros can do it then Windows should be able to do it and should actually do it.

That's hillarious. You mislabel the argument you're responding to as "Appeal to Common Practice", and then you put forth your own arguement, which IS the fallacy of "Appeal to Common Practice"!

Re:A good house guest.

I feel allow duel boot is a good house guest option

You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means.

mind you...

After a long boot sequence...
XP: You are wonderful!
Distro in black: Thank you -- I've worked hard to become so.
XP: I admit it you are better than i am...
Distro in black: Then why are you smiling?
XP: because i know something you don't know.
Distro in black: And what is that?
XP: I am not left-handed....

Re:dual boot?

"Microsoft desperately wants Linux to go away"
I think you may have got that backwards...

At last

Hopefully this'll mean Windows may actually be able to deal with changing mainboard & cpu without freaking out and throwing its toys out of the pram.

XP takes a swift nose-dive for me when I upgrade my core components; it makes upgrading an even more painful process. As for Linux, I've yet to test this, but I gather it responds much better than XP to new hardware?

Re:At last

Simple solution - immediately before you upgrade a major component, run:
sysprep -nosidgen

You have the choice of running with existing settings or running mini-setup if you're running XP SP2. The only thing I can't recall is what effect that'll have on activation...

Otherwise the only other thing you'll have problems with is changing the underlying HAL from ACPI to non-ACPI.

See: MS sysprep kb article [microsoft.com] and more usefully Killian's sysprep guide [geocities.com]

Fewer Choices?

If this is basically going to just decompress windows onto your drive, where do the install options come in to play?

Still, anything that makes installs easier is probably a good thing, at least to the average user.

Re:Fewer Choices?

No wonder non-nerds all run windows, even the (pseudo?) nerds haven't tried Linux.

'Nerd' is not a synonym for 'Linux user'. This may be a surprise to you; for many others it is not.

Re:Fewer Choices?

Still, anything that makes installs easier is probably a good thing, at least to the average user.

While I agree in principle, generally speaking the average user will not be installing Windows, or any other OS.

Does it install faster?

Does this make it install faster? How is it different from copying files? Going of on a rant, why are current installers so bloated? InstallShield is like 2 MB in itself, and MSI takes ages to install something. The only good installer I've seen is NSIS (and it's VERY good), it's like 30 KB, copies your files/makes whatever changes you want and that's it.

What do other installers do that make them take hours to finish?

IKEA catelog?

My geek karma must be off today. When I read the title, instead of thinking CD image, I thought "what, is windows going to just be a bunch of pictures of guys pointing and clicking with no actual instructions like an IKEA assembly manual"?

Anywho, this is a cool idea and it's begging for someone to create a "Vista Live" hack, much like the current *nix live CD's (Knoppix anyone?).

Yeah, it's Monday.

Boot CD

Sounds like it might be trivial to make a nice little boot disc for Vista, in this case.

Pros & Cons summarized

This wasn't a Pros & Cons. It was a love-fest of the new Image-Based install process. Everything he wrote in that article was happy go lucky, no cons in site.

• this means that the image isn't a bit-for-bit image of your disk layout, and hence you can apply the image to a new system without destroying the contents of the hard drive
• Vista is hardware-agnostic, so you can use a single system image as a source for multiple hardware platforms, even if they have quite different hardware configurations
• When capturing a system to a WIM file you can specify exclusions. For example, you can have a work directory on the system with temporary data.
• Interestingly you can have as many images contained within one WIM file as you think you can manage, and any one of them can be marked as bootable.

Ok, so what is a regular install?

So then, if an image install is so different from a regular install procedure, what is a regular install procedure? How different is an installation from copying a bunch of files?

File based imaging format?!?!

However, all this is about to change. Windows Vista is based entirely around Microsoft's Windows Imaging Format (or WIM), a file-based imaging standard rather than a sector-based. this means that the image isn't a bit-for-bit image of your disk layout, and hence you can apply the image to a new system without destroying the contents of the hard drive.

Wow how revolutionary.

Oh, hang on a second while I untar this archive....

Re:File based imaging format?!?!

I don't believe TAR includes ACL and metadata information related to the filesystem. Or does it?

They can be.

The tar file format, like most unix things has undergone several revisions and branches. In POSIX.1, a new format, called the Pax Interchange Format, was created as a backwards compatible extention of the tar format, that allowed for storing of arbitrary metadata. How this metadata is used is naturally left up to the system's implementation of tar and pax. I don't know how widely these extentions are used. I know that in Mac OS 10.4, metadata including resource forks are supported, but I think they implemented them using thier normal flat-file hacks (._myfile holds metadata for myfile), and not the pax extentions. This man file [freebsd.org] has a little more information.

By the time...

Vista's released, won't DVDs be obsolete anyway?

Maybe they can put both Vista and Duke Nuke Em 3D on the same HD-DVD/BluRay disc when they're released in a few years.

Hasta La Vista, La Manzana

Some say Vista's image is tarnished, but I think we should wait until the next Apple commercial to see if it really works or not.

Article is stupid

The final linked article starts with this dubious sounding statement:

The bottom is about to fall out of the market for imaging tools like Symantec Ghost ... The Vista install DVD is, in fact, just one big system image.

But then immediately contradicts itself by pointing out:

But this flexibility only extends to the installation of Windows itself. To clone a full system with apps installed, Symantec Ghost or a similar utility must be used to create that image.

People don't use Ghost to make a copy of an unconfigured fresh install of Windows, they configure it first, then Ghost it. This new installer will have no effect whatsoever on sales of Ghost, or any other imaging software. After such a terrible start to the article, I'm not sure it's even worth reading the rest.

Re:Article is stupid

When talking about using Symantec Ghost (or other), the author is referring to Windows XP installations, not Vista.
FTFA:

In the XP world, most advanced users are used to customising the Windows install disc. It's a straightforward, if tedious, process to slipstream service packs and patches, add extra drivers and create answer files that allow XP to install with no user input.

But this flexibility only extends to the installation of Windows itself. To clone a full system with apps installed, Symantec Ghost or a similar utility must be used to create that image.

However, all this is about to change. Windows Vista is based entirely around Microsoft's Windows Imaging Format (or WIM), a file-based imaging standard rather than a sector-based.

(bold emphasis = mine)

GB?

the install DVD is actually a preinstalled copy of Windows that simply gets decompressed onto your PC

Yeah.. And by the time Vista will be released, we will have 100 GB DVDs to accomodate it.

Is it the same thing that we see on Ubuntu?

So is this revolutionary install concept an exact copy of what we see in Ubuntu?

Knoppix - Kanotix - Ubuntu - Windows

I'm sure the idea goes back even further in time but I still find it interesting to see that the technique taken by knoppix, embraced by Kanotix and finally mimiced by Ubuntu is now being used by MS. The question is will you be able to carry around these vista images as a live system taking advantage of it's hardware detection to run your own copy of windows on any machine (real or virtual)? If not officially, will someone be able to produce a neat hack to do it? I would have thought everyone would like to have their own liveDVD of their system, featuring all the stuff they wanted installed and all their settings.

The wrong problem

This is vaguely interesting, I suppose, but I'd much rather see an image-based boot sequence. It should be much faster to copy 100 meg or so of stuff to RAM that to actually wait for all the programs to start up. You'd only need to do the real boot process after installing something, and make a new image before handing control to the user.

Darn, I was looking for a source-based install

I'd love to spend a week -emerge(ing) a Vista designed specifically for my computer.

Rootkit

MS is just anticipating virtual rootkits. Having an image to compare to the installed system will provide a check of subverted files etc.

Old hat, old news

Major hardware vendors have been doing this with Microsoft OS's for years. HP has their smart start CDs that come with server rigs, and their restore disks that come with workstations that are all based off of the Unattended install principle. Other major vendors (dell, gateway) are no exception. It seems pretty much everybody who deals with thousands of systems knows and uses this capability. The article is just a dog and pony show, touting how wonderful it's going to be now that Microsoft is the gatekeeper of unattended installs. [microsoft.com] This stuff dates back to win2k, and probably earlier. Ok, so the HAL is no longer an issue for people who liked to goober things with hardware specific images. From the sound of it, the option of a hardware specific image is gone, so the Pro is we lose features?

Oh wait, it looks like the *biggest* change [microsoft.com] is that unattended.txt (the configuration file for automated installs) is now unattended.xml. Other good ideas used to further extend the Microsoft monopoly on your workstation environment include "binary based image format" (like people have had with ghost for years...)

I've still failed to realise why this would be interesting to someone other than people who work in IT, and even then it fails to be more than a footnote to the vista image deployment gotchas.

does vista break ghost then?

Has anyone else tried using ghost with vista? I did an experiment this morning where I created a ghost image of a vista box and tried to restore it on another, identical computer. Vista wouldn't boot; it said that the selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt. Booting from the install cd and selecting repair fixed it though.

Haven't had a chance to google this yet, so it may be a known bug.

Smalltalk and Emacs did this.

IMHO Imaging an OS install is a good thing.

The mother of all windows, Smalltalk, Did just this.
And when you where finished for the day ST did
a sort of core dump to disk. When you want to
start up it restored your workspace just where you left off.

Emacs was so slow to load all of its lisp macros
the authors did the same thing dumping the core
image into an a.out file and starting that each time.

Perhaps You think Imaging a disk is different.
But I propose that its just the same thing as a different
level of the memory hierarchy. You just install into
a 800meg partition and dump to CD. same thing.
Make it bootable, add a start up that rus the installer
and copy it to disk.

The good old days of DOS

Remember when DOS used to install into ONE arbitrary directory, and put a 3 or 4 files in the root of the drive? Reinstalling dos, or installing multiple OSes was as simple as having two dos directories. Multiple versions could be installed that way, also, although there could only be one set of boot files in the root of the active partition...although I'm sure the Windows way is necessary with all the new hardware, DOS did run on multiple hardware platforms, and was easy to install...I wish more software installed into one directory, and kept all its data files in its directory too...then installing windows & linux would be as simple as putting windows in c:\win and linux in c:\lin, and some kind of program to swap the root files when the system boots...(a bootloader?) Yeah, okay, so the partitions (harddisk bit layouts) are incompatable, so I guess this may be kind of a pointless post...

"hardware agnostic"

OK...does that mean that Vista will be unsure as to whether my hardware exists or not? Hmm... "VISTA HAS PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION... actually is it illegal? who says what is legal or not? Perhaps it is legal for me but not for you? sorry, WINDOWS DOES NOT BELIEVE YOUR HARDWARE EXISTS. CONVINCE ME YOUR HARDWARE IS THERE, AND ILL LET YOU INTO YOUR COMPUTER" I think I would prefer "hardware fanaticism" personally. -JWR

Question. Knoppix

When I boot from a live Knoppix CD there is nothing in the GUI that would allow me to install it. It would be lovely if I could check that my hardware is supported and choose something in a GUI that would reboot into the installer.

Is there some fundamental reason this is impossible or am I simply a moron fo not finding the right command?

(I'm sitting next to a windows machine running PXE and the system just rebooted into the installer as I'm typing this).

You mean like Linux?

Most Linux distros (actually BSD flavors too) install the base system this way. it's just an archive (deb,tgz,etc) of the base system that gets expanded and is fairly hardware agnostic. Gentoo is entirely this way (you get a tgz which you manually decompress onto a formatted partition).

It is a heck of a lot easier to order data for efficient access on CD/DVD media when you have just on big file you read sequentially and dump to disk, than hundreds of files that you might have to seek to in some installer specific arbitrary order.

This might not be a bad idea for Ubuntu to follow, preinstall ubuntu and dump it straight to disk. Then unintall any packages you don't want. I'm assuming when you install a fresh system you have at least 1gb of overhead on the disk, normally people wouldn't install a new OS and completely fill up the disk leaving no space for real files.

I kind of wish Mac OS X would install faster, and that I wouldn't forget to click on "options..." to disable all the junk I don't need. (like 1gb+ of printer drivers)

Just Plain Wow!

Wow, a Live CD install. Where or where have I ever heard about that idea before?

I know. I'll just wait for Microsoft to give credit-where-credit-is-due. They'll do that. They're fair. They respect other people's ideas. I'll just wait.

Waiting...
.
.
.
Still waiting.
.
.
.
Sigh!

*bleh* I hated it when it was called RIS

I'm partly responsible for an image that goes on around 5-600 machines at a Midwestern University College lab. We tried RIS when it was out, but althought it was cool, it was simply not practical. The savings of having 'one' image really didn't outweigh the impracticality of it taking 2-3 hours per workstation per lab.

This is no different; currently it doesn't support multicasting and so although it's 'revolutionary' (read: RIS) it still doesn't beat the ability to push down and image to a workstation is less than 20 minutes...oops, did I say a workstation, I meant a lab.

It still won't beat Ghost any time soon, IMO.

Re:*bleh* I hated it when it was called RIS

This is no different; currently it doesn't support multicasting and so although it's 'revolutionary' (read: RIS) it still doesn't beat the ability to push down and image to a workstation is less than 20 minutes...oops, did I say a workstation, I meant a lab.

Windows Deployment Services, the replacement for RIS that will be comming out around the same time Vista ships, does exactly that. RIS only does the OS install well. Once you create your master image, you can place that onto a WDS server and multicast it out to as many computers as you have bandwidth. My current image when run deployed with imageX comes in at 25% less space (both images on max compression) and deploys in aprox 12 min for the image copy, plus the normal mini-setup time.

Ghost aint going away, but it will be eaten away from at the bottom with WDS.

Microsoft reinvents zip files

It's not really "image based". It's just another file archiving system, with one big file full of many compressed files. Like "zip" files. This is mostly a hype phrase, because "Microsoft announces new, incompatible compressed file format" would sound so stupid.

There are true "image based" systems. QNX [qnx.com] has one. A QNX image, containing the microkernel, the servers, and any desired application programs, can be built, burned into ROM, and executed from ROM. This is how embedded systems start up, from copiers to routers to car navigation systems. Vista isn't doing that.

Hardware agnostic?

So the software is not sure if it believes in the existence of hardware?
I am not sure if I want an operating system with existential angst. //BTW I think the submitter means "hardware independent".

BootCamp?

My immediate query is how well will this work with Apple's BootCamp? Could this cripple / force a re - install of OS X on a BootCamp machine?

Could this be some shot across the bows of Apple? Windows ain't done, 'til OS X won't run?

Maybe I've just been sipping too much conspiracy Kool-aid...

copying a bunch of files is the RIGHT way

Damn it, one of the things that always annoys me about Windows is that it's NOT as simple as copying a bunch of files.
This is mostly due to their inane and out-dated drive lettering scheme.

In Linux (or any Unix), I can move my installed system to a different drive or partition just by copying it. I can install an entire system within a folder of another system. All I have to do is change my drive mounts, add some symlinks, or use chroot, and I can put the entire system anywhere and it's as if nothing changed.

When my Dad bought a new harddrive because his old one was dying, we tried in vain to copy his old system over to the new drive. First we tried imaging it using "dd" on a liveCD, but that didn't work. Then we tried making a new filesystem and using "cp" to just copy the whole thing. That didn't either. We didn't want to spend money on Norton Ghost, just for a one-time thing.. He ended up having to re-install and re-activate XP, re-install all his MS Office software he'd had some trouble with installing in the first place, and finally setting up a whole new system. Just because he wanted to replace his drive!

That, compared to the number of times I've moved my Linux system without a single hitch... I can't believe people put up with this crap. Now instead of keeping things simple, they're moving even FURTHER away from a file-based approach?

oh, a disk image based installer...

I thought Microsoft finnally caught up with a GUI installer for windows. ;)

Dell's " Pre-Installed Crap" Vista DVD

"you can also install your own apps into it so that your Vista install becomes a full system image install." I am afraid that companies like Dell will be delivering a custom made Vista Install CD with all their crap on it, so it won't be possible to install a clean Vista anymore. I for one hope that these apps will be optional during an installation, otherwise I think a lot of people are going to be stuck with all that crap.

I'd like to be able to reinstall just the OS...

Seems like it would really be ground breaking if Vista would isolate the OS from the apps & data effectively enough that you could do a complete reinstall of the OS without having to reinstall your apps or data. I've attempted to do that with Linux, just by keeping stuff I add later out of the root partition, putting things in /usr/local/bin, ctc.., though I've had to keep up to date a script that I use which will reapply any OS tweaks I've added since install (mostly configuration adjustments). And in Linux, you have to keep every old version of every library you've ever linked with pretty much for ever anyway, in order to keep old apps working (or you could link everything static I suppose), so it's mostly possible to do this under Linux but it's by no means automatic.

If Vista could make that a no-brainer it would be at least one thing I can think of that might make me consider upgrading to it. That, and the ability to absolutely enforce a restricted input focus so apps or the OS absolutely cannot steal input focus away from you while you're typing, except for imminent crisis warnings which would be limited to immediate data loss-- system crashing, out of disk space, etc.. I'd pay extra $$$ for that last feature, on any OS...

Image-Based=Everything Required?

I guess there's no chance of me to prevent things like MSN Messager from being installed and adding garbage to the registry. Instead, I'd have to find the cryptic run command to uninstall it, which still leaves the problem of extra crap in the registry.

How do you decide what gets installed?

Mac OS X gives you control over which packages get installed. You can leave out the language packs, throw in X11, etc. If the Vista install disk is just a big image, how do you control what gets installed?

Having seen the beta ...

I had a look at the beta build 5112. WIM is by no means new. Both the technology and the name of the exe (XIMAGE), first made their debut with Compaq restore disks. The process is different to, say, GHOST, and is more akin to a giant RAR file or something. OS/2 has been doing something along the line with PACK and PACK2 files from way back. The two WIM files represent respectively, a version of WinPE, and the installation. With a slight edit of the WinPE, you can change the shell to cmd.exe, and add your own utilities to it. It then becomes a boot Windows diskette that lives in RAM. After WinPE boots, it runs its default shell, like the eCom station version, is setup. Unlike the OS/2 version [which is about 5 years old], you can't do anything other than install the OS. Oh, well, still 5 years behind the edge. What you can't do with WIM, is to install it from a different version of Windows. Basically, the setup does the rego check etc before it bothers to process the data .WIM. It does "install" faster, largely because most of the files are in one archive. On the other hand, those of you who had to deal with a faulty file on a cdrom.... W

Re:Linux/MacOS loosing advantages

No, it just means they know how to steal ideas.

Re:Linux/MacOS loosing advantages

Ease of installation is not an applicable issue for most of the computing public, who buys computers with the OS already installed.

Re:Linux/MacOS loosing advantages

Linux/MacOS loosing advantages

I hope their are not, from the pictures of the goatse guy I have seen loosing advantage seems to be pretty painful

Re:Linux/MacOS loosing advantages

Perhaps, although they still have one huge advantage over Vista - they've both been released. Microsoft is settling into the role of Sisyphus [wikipedia.org], and every time they get close to the release date, their giant stone goes rolling back down the hill for months of additional changes.

Either MS is really taking their time and putting out a stable, low bug system (for a change), or this is just a sign of trouble to come once the install is available on your Dell custom PC...

Re:Linux/MacOS loosing advantages

Oh, tell me about it. But then again that's been the story ever since Apple put the Mac out. Microsoft has *always* been playing the game of catch-up. And for all the much-lauded advantages of running Windows vs. other OSs because of GAMES, well, let's be honest about it: Microsoft's developed DirectX, true, but it's simply riding on the backs of the power of everyone elses' hardware. Try running Quake, Unreal, KOTR, etc., etc., with the latest version of DirectX using a low-end mobo and a shitty video card. Just ain't happening...