Slipstreaming refers to a technique that's been around for a while, but it's a bit of pain, to be honest. Anyone who has put a clean install of Windows on an older machine knows the fun and games that come with the install, finding the driver disks, getting Windows operational, to find you need to download 100Mb of hot fixes. Hence the term slipstreaming!

Then you find out you have to download and install XP SP2. And then apply another 50Mb of hot fixes. On a normal business internet connection, this not only ties up your bandwidth but takes a hell of a lot of time, that could be far better spent elsewhere.

So how do we slipstream? What does it actually do? Well, basically we take our original licensed windows media, download the network install service packs, any hotfixes we want, and custom drivers for that machine, and combine into one single easy to use slipstream install.

I'll give you an example of why this can help. We recently upgraded office hardware, and ordered a new Dell E520 for one of our designers. Adobe products are notoriously thirsty on memory, so we wouldn't dream of providing a machine with less than 4Gb of RAM and multi core processor. Dell supplied it with XP Home + SP2, which is useless to us because we are licensed for XP Professional already for many machines - no point buying the license again.

That's where the fun started. The E520 comes with no floppy drive by default, but comes with a new SATA controller chipset, that XP doesn't know about. The Dell supplied XP Home install works fine, but you can't upgrade to XP Pro because the media is older. It won't even let you do a dual boot install which would have done the trick. Thanks for that, Bill...

Ok, not to worry, let's rip a floppy drive out of a spare machine and connect it. Ah. We can't because Dell has gone legacy free and we don't have a power connector in the harness. No issue there, let's do some jury rigging with another PSU, and we're set. Only we're not. The BIOS doesn't like this legacy floppy for some reason, even after we turn the feature on.

So, not to be daunted, down to the local IT shop, pick a USB floppy drive, never know when one will come in handy right? Well, I can tell you - not during a Windows XP Pro install. Whether it's Dell or a Microsoft issue I don't know, but when it comes to the file copy section, it won't even spin up the USB floppy drive. Doesn't even see it.

At this point, I was scratching my beard somewhat. Dell were not the greatest of help, it has to be said - they verified the hardware was working, and wanted to bill me for O/S support. Not too impressed with that, I must say.

So. Time to do the old slipstream install, and put everything together in one tidy package. This slipstream process in the past has been rather painful. Google with some hunting did point me towards nLite, a shareware product that had one good review for doing slipstreaming, and not much else. Having said that, I'd tried some other slipstreaming methods and not gotten very far.

So, I downloaded and gave it a try. I must say I was impressed. I didn't need to read the documentation, just followed the on screen prompts. In under 5 minutes, just by pointing the application at my original XP disk, the service pack install, and the Dell drivers, it set up a new ISO for me. It even went further than that, allowing me to specify the answers to all the irritating questions you get asked half way through the XP install.

And it went perfectly. So we duly made a donation. I recommend nLite, and this product is worth a look. Give them some support, and keep them in milk and cookies! www.nliteos.com
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