Two comparison sheets are available online:

http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/summary_mf.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_archivers

are you aware of all the intricacies of the XP setup?

Leave it as-is.

People will want to customise all aspects of setup, and you can never please everyone. Trust me, I know.

If you make it do everything, then it will be good at nothing, and people will end up using specialist programs for each thing anyways.

Leave it as-is.

People will want to customise all aspects of setup, and you can never please everyone. Trust me, I know.

If you make it do everything, then it will be good at nothing, and people will end up using specialist programs for each thing anyways.

Words of wisdom. Well said.

Okay, so it's going to be pretty much the same install as it is now (which is the same as Ubuntu). I like it. Maybe it was just Lord of the Rings fans who wanted to see the mega setup

So, does anybody want to be involved in this project or am I just making flashy posts for myself?

Leave it as-is.

People will want to customise all aspects of setup, and you can never please everyone. Trust me, I know.

If you make it do everything, then it will be good at nothing, and people will end up using specialist programs for each thing anyways.

I can't agree more. As a person who made and developed (and got frustrated with - I'm sure) XPlode, Wraith knows first hand what he's talking about.

Making a product that can do everything never works. If you can make one thing that works really well at what it was meant to be, then it'll be a huge success.

btw - glad to see you around again Wraith. I'm still using XPlode for my UACDs.

I can't agree more. As a person who made and developed (and got frustrated with - I'm sure) XPlode, Wraith knows first hand what he's talking about.

...

btw - glad to see you around again Wraith. I'm still using XPlode for my UACDs.

...and I'm still being frustrated by it, but mostly that's my own fault nowadays X5 soon.

Whats so new about this?

I see only a few questions

A few words about this.

First, compression method.

Afaik files on the original CD are compressed using MSZIP cabinet compression. LZX cabinet is slower to compress, but faster to extract and outputs smaller files. Moreover it is 100% compatible.

Btw CPU is not used a lot while extracting files, even when they are on a hard drive; decompression speed is certainly always the same.

Now, I recently has the idea of cabing all the files in the same archive, not independentlly. It saves some space (10% of the CD). This needs more work, really more work before I can advise anyody to try it.

You can make things better (mostly speaking of space) but you have to stick to cabinet because windows setup doesn't understand anything else (unless you want to reverse-engineering some files)

And you as Wraith said, you can't please everyone, so just stick to current screens.

Actually, on my ThinkPad, there is a hidden partition that is used to recover the hard drive.

I invoke it by hitting F11 at bootup. It boots into a 1 Gig partition that has Windows ME on it. I tell it to reformat and reload XP. It does so using PKZIP.

First it formats the primary active partition. Then it creates the i386 folder and runs setup from it.

Once it is done, it converts from FAT32 to NTFS and then it loads all the IBM preloaded application. Finally it runs SYSPrep.

It is kind of neat and loads XP very quickly.