Question about unattended installation
 

I've been using XP Pro for a while, and while I consider it to be a pretty good OS for a home user, I have begun to have my doubts about how good it is for _me_. My main concern is performance. This is a new DELL, bought early this year, with P4 @ 1.6 GHz and almost 400 megs of RAM. A decent 40+ gig HD and a simple but sufficient ATI's 16 meg video card. It's all decent, and applications launch quickly enough...but as soon as more than a couple of apps are running, the performance decreases severely.

I've disabled all the candy crap I do not need, but I feel that for a system with these specs I ought to be getting a lot more from my system than I am. I find myself unhappier with the performance of this setup than I was when I ran W2k on a Celeron 600 MHz and 128 megs of RAM.

That being the concern, here comes the question: is there an easy way to prepare an unattended Windows installation? Or even not so easy? I find myself reformatting and reinstalling every few months, because of the exhausting use of my computer and the fact that I prefer a clean slate to giving CPR. I'd like to be able to set up my system so that I could store a copy of Windows on a partition of its own, maybe, and run the whole installation unattended from it when need be. I am sick and tired of going through all my cd-r's, looking for DirectX updates, WM9, etc.

use norton ghost or such, much simpler

yuo can make unattended installs of windows, but its mich easier with ghost.

"My main concern is performance. This is a new DELL, bought early this year, with P4 @ 1.6 GHz and almost 400 megs of RAM. A decent 40+ gig HD and a simple but sufficient ATI's 16 meg video card. It's all decent, and applications launch quickly enough...but as soon as more than a couple of apps are running, the performance decreases severely."

well, you didnt say what kind of ram (pc100, 133, etc) you are running, but I'd say the simple answer is:

get more (and/or faster) ram. from what Ive heard XP is a resource hog.

also, what are you running at startup besides the OS? a firewall and anti-virus? these will also eat up resources.

You can make unattended install floppy disks without TOO much trouble (Hit up MS's knowledgebase, I believe that they have an application to step you through it).

Otherwise, I recommend using Norton Ghost as well. Just go ahead, install Windows, install whatever drivers and patches you want, and then make the image. That way, whenever you want to "rebuild your box", just reapply the imagine and you've got a fairly basic XP build.