Features on Demand in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012

re: Features on Demand in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012

deandownsouth — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 19:46:36 GMT

"Everything needs a GUI. DISM is too unintuitive."

The dumbing down of the administrator. It's sad.

re: Features on Demand in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012

joscon [Microsoft] — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 23:59:25 GMT

@Jon;

Not easily, no. The best way to think about this would be how many dependencies does a certain role or feature have? For example, something like IIS has a lot of dependents so it would take up more space than something like BitLocker. You could theoretically walk all of the dependency chains backwards to find out how many manifests are involved but you still might not know the payload.

I'll bring this up with the feature teams as a request though, makes a lot of sense.

--Joseph

re: Features on Demand in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012

Jon Galloway — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 23:30:32 GMT

Is there a way to find out the size impact (even roughly) of each feature? I'd like to remove features to recover hard drive space, but I don't know which features take up the most space.

re: Features on Demand in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012

Andre.Ziegler — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 16:45:11 GMT

WUSA uses the WU API and this is slower. WU checks if the features are installed and if the updates is really needed and this takes some time. But a fix is to stop WU service each time before installing an update with WUSA. This speeds up the installation.

re: Features on Demand in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012

joscon [Microsoft] — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 14:58:20 GMT

DISM is faster than WUSA because it doesnt check dependancies, it just does what you tell it to do. Thats the advantage to WUSA, it will actually let you know if applicability fails via UI. I'll bring this up the next time I talk to the PG though.

re: Features on Demand in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012

xpclient — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 06:35:51 GMT

Not convenient. That is why DISM should directly support installing MSUs (and do all the work of extracting CABs into a temp directory behind the scenes). Just adding that ability will speed up installation times of MSUs because DISM is faster than WUSA.

re: Features on Demand in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012

joscon [Microsoft] — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 16:04:45 GMT

MSU is just the wrapper to the cabs. The MSU gives you the UI options, you can extract the cabs out using cmd line and then run DISM against them.

re: Features on Demand in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012

xpclient — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 06:22:39 GMT

Also DISM should support installing MSU files like it does for CABs. Can that be added? WUSA is too slow compared to DISM.

re: Features on Demand in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012

Drewfus — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 05:18:00 GMT

Ok. Thanks Joseph.

Thanks for the post, Jim.

re: Features on Demand in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012

joscon [Microsoft] — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 15:44:14 GMT

@Drew,

Mike knows far more about this area than I do, if he's even remotely involved then any fix will most likely come from his side. I would use the workaround for now.