Vista's WIM a new way to accelerate unattended applications instal

[Francesco]

After seeing that applications like Acrobat Reader when unpacked are more than 100mb (even if the original setup is just 21mb) and that if I compress those setups with 7zip it takes ages for them to extract on old computers or computers with slow HDs (laptops) I started thinking about using the new vista's WIM format to create a compressed image with the acrobat files that I can mount on XP and use it to install acrobat.

WIM images can be mounted as a driver letter (not only on Vista but also on XP and probably win2k) and have a very fast decompression so one could create a compressed WIM image with all of his uncompressed unattended applications installs and then mount it and install everything from there and still have a good speed/compression compromise.

Has somebody already tried this solution or am I the only one thinking about it?

Edited February 20, 2007 by Francesco