Clean Install vs Transporter

M

Michael M

Bit poster
Wht is the current wisdom regarding WinXP -- do a clean install or try to use transporter -- I assume that cleaning up your Win machine is a good idea -- uninstall prorams you dont use defrag etc?
but in the end is it better to do a clean install?
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Personally, I always prefer a clean installation, but I don't see any reason not to try Transporter first. And yes, I'd certainly clean up Windows before performing the import.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Michael M said:
Wht is the current wisdom regarding WinXP -- do a clean install or try to use transporter -- I assume that cleaning up your Win machine is a good idea -- uninstall prorams you dont use defrag etc?
but in the end is it better to do a clean install?
Click to expand...
I would say it is better. The likelyhood of something having gone wrong is lower when you do a clean install.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
After thinking more about it I see that I overlooked one very real concern. If Transporting XP from a physical machine which has a multi-core or hyperthreaded CPU (most Pentium 4s are hyperthreaded), the transported image will have the symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) hardware abstraction later (HAL) installed. Parallels VMs expose the CPU as a single-core unit. While Windows with an SMP HAL will certainly run on a single-core CPU, there's a lot of thread-scheduling inefficiency since the kernel expects to be able to execute multiple threads in hardware simultaneously. This has been a well-known issue with cloned Windows machines (physical and virtual) for some time.

This problem has been reported on VMWare's forums. Since it's not polite to post a link to a competitor's discussion threads, you can find the details for yourself by Googling 'smp hal'.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
mmischke said:
After thinking more about it I see that I overlooked one very real concern. If Transporting XP from a physical machine which has a multi-core or hyperthreaded CPU (most Pentium 4s are hyperthreaded), the transported image will have the symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) hardware abstraction later (HAL) installed. Parallels VMs expose the CPU as a single-core unit. While Windows with an SMP HAL will certainly run on a single-core CPU, there's a lot of thread-scheduling inefficiency since the kernel expects to be able to execute multiple threads in hardware simultaneously. This has been a well-known issue with cloned Windows machines (physical and virtual) for some time.

This problem has been reported on VMWare's forums. Since it's not polite to post a link to a competitor's discussion threads, you can find the details for yourself by Googling 'smp hal'.
Click to expand...
That's a good point, and I agree, often overlooked. It may be able to run, but not as well.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top