How-To Geek

I was searching the Internet, and found a way to install Windows Vista in 5 to 10 minutes (20 to 25 for Ultimate).

Acquire an ultra-fast USB 2.0 flash drive

The drive I and my coworkers recommend is the Apacer 4GB Handy Steno USB Flash Drive HT203, 200X Hi-Speed USB 2.0. It's the fastest USB 2.0 Flash Drive that we've found - it has a read speed of 25MBytes/sec. & a write speed-14MBytes/sec and also works great as a ReadyBoost cache. You can get them from $56.99 each:
http://www.directron.com/ht2034g.html

Format the Apacer Flash Drive

Run CMD.EXE and type the following. Note: This set of commands assumes that the USB flash drive is addressed as "disk 1". you should double check that by doing a list of the disks (type "list disk") before cleaning it. If you have multiple hard drives, like an SDFlash drive or a Multibay drive, you could end up wiping your second drive using this command.

diskpart
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit

Copy Windows Vista's DVD ROM content to the Flash Drive
Simply issue the following command to start copying all the content from the Windows Vista DVD to your newly formatted high speed flash drive.

xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\

Sounds promising, but what os to use on the usb drive?

Ok. Correct me if i'm wrong. My understanding is, with vista on the usb-drive-with-an-os, I will be able to boot from it, and install vista to my harddisk with much better speed than from the dvd rom. Right?

How long does it take you to install via DVD? I think the last format was around 20-25 minutes (w/o updates)here. Much faster compared to XP.

OK, thanks for this thread.