Windows Installer has a new installation property called MSIFASTINSTALL. Using the MSIFASTINSTALL property can help reduce the time required to install a windows installer package. The FASTOEM property is designed to enable OEMs to reduce the time it takes to install Windows Installer applications for a specific scenario.

MSIFASTINSTAL reduces the installation time

The trick behind MSIFASTINSTALL is quite simple, it just skips things that consume time like creating a system restore point or calculating the space requirements – File Costing.

The value of the MSIFASTINSTALL property can be a combination of the following values. It is available only in Windows Installer 5.0 and later.

So if you do not need system restore points and know that your clients have enough disk space anyway, you could consider using the MSIFASTINSTALL property to speed up application installations.

Use the following commands:

msiexec /i Firefox-3.5-en-US.msi MSIFASTINSTALL=1 /l*v C:\MSTTEST\Install.log /qb

msiexec /i skypesetup.msi MSIFASTINSTALL=1 /l*v C:\MSTTEST\Install.log /qb

More information about the MSIFASTINSTALL property can be found here.

You might also want to take a look at the FASTOEM property to learn more about it.