Is this an MSI problem, or a VM artifact?
I'm just curious: Do MSI based installers always take a long time to "validate the installation", or am I seeing the picture below because I'm running Windows under a VM (Parallels)? I really don't know, but I'd love to find out :)
Comments
Short answer: Yes
[Bogdan Iosif] May 20, 2009 12:17:12.209
In my extensive experience with VMs hosted on a desktop/laptop, the disk I/O system is the weakest link in the general VM performance chain.
Coraborate the previous statement with the the fact that MSI is generally a pig when it comes to using resources and especially when it comes to stuff like patches and upgrades. The mechanisms behind all MSI operations are built to ensure coherence & security and disconsider any other design qualities such as efficient use of disk space, performance, elegance, etc. etc. This means that MSI will always trash your disk, especially during patches/upgrades.
You shouldn't worry about that installation step as there is no easy answer on what MSI does there. I can tell you that it checks some installation preconditions and tries to automatically fail the installation if you don't have enough disk space, etc. In order to do that it does some inspection of your system and of the MSI installed apps "db" from your system.
If you really really love to find out exactly what it does then you can waste a couple of days from your life and learn to run your installation with some switches in order to activate complex logging for MSI. Then waste some months of your life trying to understand the logging info that MSI spits out.
Just leave it alone and be happy.