GrofLuigi Posted April 13, 2007 Share Posted April 13, 2007 I see MANY people are working hard to find silent switches for application installs or to create silent installers. And MANY MORE are using them. I have one question for you, folks:Wouldn't you like to know if something goes wrong?I'm not trying to pick up a fight here, I'm just amazed when I see all this effort wasted (in my opinion). I cannot understand the logic behind it - how will you troubleshoot if you have a problem? You won't even know you have one.Please enlighten me.GL Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kelsenellenelvian Posted April 13, 2007 Share Posted April 13, 2007 Silent installs and fully tested setups literally save thousands of dollars and man-hours.I have a dvd that is 3.5 gigs and once the partition is selected it fully installs windows and all of the apps that have been added. (Including office 2007 and paint\photoshop) All of this is done in less than an hour with no babysitting or button pushing needed.The key is proper testing. That is what VMWare or virtualPC is made for. Designing a proper CD\DVD can take time but once you have it down pat you can update and modify it very easily thus saving lots of time and money when you have a LOT of pc's to install and update.Some people actually have 50+ systems to regularly upkeep and reinstall.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ryath Posted April 13, 2007 Share Posted April 13, 2007 Silent installs and fully tested setups literally save thousands of dollars and man-hours.I have a dvd that is 3.5 gigs and once the partition is selected it fully installs windows and all of the apps that have been added. (Including office 2007 and paint\photoshop) All of this is done in less than an hour with no babysitting or button pushing needed.The key is proper testing. That is what VMWare or virtualPC is made for. Designing a proper CD\DVD can take time but once you have it down pat you can update and modify it very easily thus saving lots of time and money when you have a LOT of pc's to install and update.Some people actually have 50+ systems to regularly upkeep and reinstall....Take what he said then automate it via RIS so its done over the network and you have yourself a money / time saving winner times 10000000. So when the next batch of 200 desktop units come in, you dont pass out Instead you take it to their allocated positions, plugin, network boot, then sit back and watch the os install, software install, configurations install, ready for user! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GrofLuigi Posted April 13, 2007 Author Share Posted April 13, 2007 Thank you both for your answers. It's a little clearer now. GL Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ajua Posted April 14, 2007 Share Posted April 14, 2007 besides those scenarios, wich many of us are involved into, there's another one, many of us like to try many things everyday. windows gets cluttered, programs cause crashes and every now and then every user needs to reformat for a clean install. unattendedly installing windows along with drivers, programs, tweaks etc is a time saving and effort less task. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Evolver Posted April 14, 2007 Share Posted April 14, 2007 I'm with elajua...It's not only very usefull for installs on many computers, but can be very handy for everyone...The reason why I started doing this was because I hated reïnstalling everthing again and again.After many installs and uninstalls and working, downloading, erasing, desinfecting,... systems becomes less and less stable.Then, I have to start looking for my drivers again, configure everything again, reinstall everything again,...It never happened at a good time, so I always tried to continue on a bad system untill there was really no more other way than reïnstalling.But yeah right, even while I hate reinstalling, I'm working much longer on making everything unattended now.Then I was also thinking: Why do I do this?I didn't even have to think long about it: last month, a very bad virus answered that question for me.Now I can really laugh with things like that...Even scanning my system took longer than reinstalling, but I tried never-the-less to beat that thing first (without fear of losing everything).After I got rid of it (yes I did), I still reïnstalled my system anyway to make absolutely sure that nothing stayed behind, I surely wouldn't have done that without my unattendedXPinstaller.GrofLuigi asked: I cannot understand the logic behind it - how will you troubleshoot if you have a problem?Silent installs are prepared out of full installs, so they have been tested before.One could ask the same question when starting up a system without reïnstalling everything.Even with visible installations, certain things can happen without notice...But eversince I started creating my own unattende installs, I've learned more about what installations do in the background: in the registry, the ini-files, the uninstallers,... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
[deXter] Posted April 14, 2007 Share Posted April 14, 2007 (edited) Wouldn't you like to know if something goes wrong?Sure. We do get to know if anything goes wrong. The GUI isn't the only way for a program to output errors, you know. There is something called as logs. Just check the log file and you'll know what exactly went wrong ---I don't know about the other silent-install makers here, but I always make my scripts log to a file so I'll know what happened. For some setups, (especially the ones that take a long time to complete) I usually add a hotkey which when pressed temporarily unhides the program. Releasing the button will hide the program again. In another setup of mine, I added a tooltip (that follows the mouse) which shows all the statusbar or progressbar text. (extracted live from the hidden installer.) Edited April 14, 2007 by [deXter] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
siddharth.c Posted April 17, 2007 Share Posted April 17, 2007 Dexter could you please tell me how you did the tooltip and the un-hiding thing? Seems really interesting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
[deXter] Posted April 17, 2007 Share Posted April 17, 2007 ^ I use AutoHotKey to make all my silent setups. Now the normal procedure that we use is to launch the setup with the /qa or similar switches which runs it in hidden/silent mode, but I don't do that, since I can do that externally and have a greater control. So I Run the setup program with the Hide parameter.To hide/unhide the setup, I just do a ~^!::WinShow, Installer Title~^! Up::WinHideThis would show the installer when ctrl + alt is held. As soon as ctrl + alt are released, the window is hidden again.As for the tooltip, I just make a Loop and use ControlGetText or StatusBarGetText to extract text/status from the installer, and display it with ToolTip. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sk8er_boi Posted April 17, 2007 Share Posted April 17, 2007 silent installation the best things after sex lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jcarle Posted April 17, 2007 Share Posted April 17, 2007 No one mentioned fun? Damnit, we do it because it's fun! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Evolver Posted April 19, 2007 Share Posted April 19, 2007 No one mentioned fun? Damnit, we do it because it's fun!Yes it's fun...It's about discovering...Discovering possibilities I didn't even know about......even discovering my own possibilities I didn't even know about Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lolita Posted April 19, 2007 Share Posted April 19, 2007 (edited) silent installation the best things after sex lolDefinitely, best thing is sillent installing WHILE having sex, guaranted! Edited April 19, 2007 by Lolita Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kiki Burgh Posted April 19, 2007 Share Posted April 19, 2007 ha! ha! nothing to disturb you in the middle of whatever it is you are pre-occupied with ... being more productive! ... multi-tasking ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now