Is there any way i can install XP Pro in 20 mins or less?

with a ghost ?

lol i kno its pretty much impossible but if there is... i want the fastest way to install XP

Norton Ghost does it in 2 mins!

Make a clean install of Windows XP, get all the settings as you want them and don't install any apps. Ghost an image of that and store it on another hard drive. Whenever you want to restore, start up Ghost again and choose to overwrite the drive with the image, and its done in about 2 mins (depending on HDD speeds and IDE placement)

thanks ill have to try that sometime

Ghost is nice. Good compression ratio. Only takes me 5 mins or so to ghost a partition.

-gosh

Pity it isn't free...

Maybe I'm missing something here, but won't this (using Ghost) cause problems for installing to machines with different hardware? Maybe everyone else works in an environment that can afford to upgrade every machine at once.

my experience is bad with ghosting to different hardware too.

a lot of the time if the ide controllers are different you will get a BSOD staright away.

If it does boot there are often problems with onboard devices.

Perhaps you could ghost the image of a part install which has halted at the /syspart stage as detailed here to speed up an install?

http://www.MSFN.org/board/index.php?showtopic=9509

I think that hardware on other machine should be compatibile on the HAL layer, as it must be compatibile with installing using sysprep.

i am sure if you setup a system run sysprep and tick certain box's you can install on a totally diffrent system using ghost, also ghost generates a new SID automatically for the machine if i am correct.