Interesting Tidbit about the Future of XP

[mmarable]

Okay, so I was at a presentation put on by the Microsoft rep assigned to our campus. It was basically a dog and pony show for Vista and Office 2007, but he said something interesting about what's in store for XP.

He said that around the SP3 timeframe, Windows XP is going to be distribured in the WIM format just like Vista is going to be.

Now, does that mean that they're rewriting the installer or just offering the WinPE 2.0 boot loader and a syspreped XPSP3 WIM image that is laid down? I don't know. I just thought that it was interesting. I supposed it takes the whole modularization of Vista a step farther. I mean the Vista install is just a syspreped image that basically plugs into the new WinPE boot loader. I don't see why it wouldn't work for XP as well, at least in theory.

Anyway, I just wanted to toss it out there in case anyone else has heard of this or may have more info.

Thanks

[cluberti]

I'm not entirely sure (this is not party line), but I believe it probably has to do with making XP installable and image-able via WDS more than anything else.

[CoffeeFiend]

Could be, but either ways, pretty much anything will be better than the current outdated installer, which has been one of my main gripes about windows... I mean, the useless text mode part (using short filenames no less), press F6 to load a driver from a floppy (not from usb memory stick or something useful), etc. And either ways, no matter what you select, it copies pretty much the whole thing to your HD (not like that much storage is expensive nowadays either), it's kind of pointless (might as well copy it all), all it really needs to do is configure the system properly. And the new deployment solutions also means no more need for ghost et al.