• Registered: 2007-06-07
  • Posts: 11

Topic: Decompressed driverpack integration

Since I need to burn my DriverPacked XP installation discs to DVD, I was hoping to find a way to integrate the DriverPacks without compression since the DVD should have enough room on it and I believe that it would take less time for the DriverPack software to copy the decompressed drivers from the DVD rather than go through the lengthy decompression during Windows install. I searched the forums and surprisingly didn't find any mention about others interested in this possibility. Has anyone else done any work on this? Is it a faster method? If it is faster, I would think it would be a relatively simple matter to implement this in DriverPack BASE. Is anyone else interested in this possibility?

  • From: Cambridgeshire, UK
  • Registered: 2007-01-27
  • Posts: 6,226

Re: Decompressed driverpack integration

Well ask yourself this question.  Would it be quicker to copy 100MB or 1000MB?  With compression, the file-copy process is much quicker then decompressed.  The decompression process after the file-copy takes less time than copying the decompressed files.
Although, to be honest, I haven't taken any timings to confirm that.  So take my ramblings with a grain of salt. smile

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  • Registered: 2006-05-30
  • Posts: 81

Re: Decompressed driverpack integration

The one advantage I would see in this would be not needing to copy over ALL drivers to the system being installed, as with hardware changes, one could simply use the CD used for installing.  Perhaps simply changing the KTD path to point to the UNCOMPRESSED DriverPack folder on the CD after installation would be the simple solution.

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DizzyDen
  • Helmi
  • Moderator & Translator (German)
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  • From: Germany
  • Registered: 2006-05-27
  • Posts: 1,799

Re: Decompressed driverpack integration

mr_smartepants wrote:

Well ask yourself this question.  Would it be quicker to copy 100MB or 1000MB?  With compression, the file-copy process is much quicker then decompressed.  The decompression process after the file-copy takes less time than copying the decompressed files.
Although, to be honest, I haven't taken any timings to confirm that.  So take my ramblings with a grain of salt. smile

It certainly depends on your HW, but I'm with Erik on this one.

It's just like using UPX to compress your EXE files.
It takes a little more CPu time and RAM to extract them during runtime but you gain from the compression because the file is read much faster from the HDD.

Unless you were using a very fast DVD drive with a fast controller but a very slow CPU and slow or little RAM (192 MB is AT THE VERY LEAST recommended, I urge you not to install on less than 256 MB to make sure the extraction does not need to swap to the HDD, which will be extra slow, I guess, because it cannot yet use DMA), the method currently should actually be faster.

You could try for yourself (though it's not totally scientific):
Copy the DVD with extracted files (just extract all DriverPacks and burn them on an RW medium) to the HDD and compare that to the time it took to extract all DriverPacks onto the HDD (preferably again using an RW as the source of the archives).

Of course, this time, there will be DMA support and also better page file caching support, but still... wink

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