Topic: Dialog before drivers extraction

I would like to choose which driver packs to extract.  A dialog with all drivers chosen and possibility to uncheck all or some hanging for about 10 to 20 sec.

Re: Dialog before drivers extraction

Is your goal to speed up the extraction process or do you want to save HDD space used by unneeded (for that system) drivers?

I certainly wouldn't mind such an option with the ability to interact with a couple of seconds (so as to not interrupt the unattended process for too long).
However, I think if you were going to sort through ALL drivers then that will take longer than selecting packages for a Linux distro tongue
And unselecting drivers by packs isn't that clever, either, because you'll ususally need a driver from all of them.

Your best option so far is to simply kick drivers you are sure you will never need out of the pack (extract, delete the dirs, repack).

Re: Dialog before drivers extraction

I think he means a feature that you would add all the driver packs to the source, however would bring up a dialog box before extracting drivers, so that you could choose what packs would be installed or not...

This would help for testing/compatibility issues... so that if you know that there is a known issue with.. lets say, AC97 sound causing BSoD on this hardware... you could uncheck the corresponding sound pack... and would still be able to get windows installed, without having to create a completely new source disk! plus the option to not install unneeded packs to save time, when they are not needed.

I myself would find the above feature VERY helpful.

~Dave

Re: Dialog before drivers extraction

It could be added to un7zip.exe .... I'll ask my friend who coded the tool.

Re: Dialog before drivers extraction

My goal is to speed installation on some old Pentium 3 class comps. Windows XP contains drivers for them, so no need of  driverpacks and Pentium 3 are really slow in extraction. So I would like to save my time. Thank you for a quick responce.

Re: Dialog before drivers extraction

Busel wrote:

My goal is to speed installation on some old Pentium 3 class comps. Windows XP contains drivers for them, so no need of  driverpacks and Pentium 3 are really slow in extraction. So I would like to save my time. Thank you for a quick responce.

May I ask how much RAM those machines sport?

While a slow CPU certainly contributes to the problem I found that too little RAM (<192MB) definately slows down the extraction and installation process by a large share.

This is not meant to vote against your suggestion and probabaly also not the answer you wanted (as it may require spending money on these old machines) but should still not be disregarded wink

Re: Dialog before drivers extraction

.7z files are compressed using LZMA ultra setting, which requires at least 66 Mb free to decompress an archive.
My friend told me it wasn't to much work to add this "unselect DriverPacks" feature.

Re: Dialog before drivers extraction

maxximum wrote:

.7z files are compressed using LZMA ultra setting, which requires at least 66 Mb free to decompress an archive.

Indeed, and add some RAM for the Windows installation environment and the 7-zip.EXE '(I'm not sure if that is already included in the 66MB).
Since most older system feature 64MB RAM, that is not going to suffice - and you wouldn't want to run Win2k or better on that little anyway.

My friend told me it wasn't to much work to add this "unselect DriverPacks" feature.

That's nice to hear, but the way I understand it that means you can only deselect whole DriverPacks instead of single drivers/devices out of these packs.
So, the only benefit would be deselecting DriverPack WLAN and two of the three DPGs if you do not need these.

(Big advantage would be regarding the 3PDPs, please make sure your friend will take these into account, if possible!
For me, these take up more space than all official packs combined, so there you can save most time)

Re: Dialog before drivers extraction

That's nice to hear, but the way I understand it that means you can only deselect whole DriverPacks instead of single drivers/devices out of these packs.
So, the only benefit would be deselecting DriverPack WLAN and two of the three DPGs if you do not need these.

He's got the link to this post ... so yes : unselect the DP you don't want, not unselect all DriverPacks at the same time (but, I guess you could do it unselecting DP one after each other).

Re: Dialog before drivers extraction

Empty

Last edited by Busel (2007-06-25 04:55:54)

Re: Dialog before drivers extraction

Helmi wrote:

May I ask how much RAM those machines sport?

Mostly 256MB minus videoRAM, but installing rarely on 128MB I did not notice much slower extraction.

Last edited by Busel (2007-06-25 04:54:34)