hp computer at college

At my College we got Hp computers, with 2.66gig, only 533fsb, 256mb -16mb share for onboard graphics. We bring our removable cage with a hard drive in it. My cage is a lianli, with ata100, wd 160gig 7200rpm, 8 meg cache in it. The cdrom appears to be a Samsung 48x. Basicilly not a very "top of line computer", but what amazes, me it took 8mins to install windows xp, I never seen this before. Even with the same hard drive on intel p4 3.0c with 512ram.
Can anyone give me some cluess why this might be the reason why its so fast.
Thanks

The fewer devices you have to install drivers for, the faster the Windows install will go. If your HDD was already formatted, that will speed things up too. OS installation speed is also determined more by the speed of the CD-ROM and HDD rather than speed of the CPU.

Is it a fresh install or is it an image. My guess is, its an image

It was off the cd, I did a full format, this took a few minutes, but after the formate was complete, It copies and installed everything amazing fast. And this pc has sound, lan, video. I am just curious why with a pc similar config, agp video geforce 2 old one, no sound, onboard lan, 16x dvd drive, 512ram p4 3gig, wd 120gig 7200rpm 8meg, takes 25min to install winxp in the same maner of installation as I did at the school.
Thanks

The windows xp install is very strange. I have found that it varies form machine to mahcine on how fast it installs. I have my good comp take 45 min for a full install while my parents comp would take 20.

First thing I thought of was that it was an image, or a really stripped down unattended install version.