How long does Vista take to install?

I've installed Vista x86 & x64 numerous times and it takes less than an hour.

This time it's taking hours

What the heck! Is Vista downloading and installing SP1 as updates too?

I'm about ready to kill the installation and start over

shouldnt take that long mine takes about 20 minutes of vista x64 sp1

I don't know what the hang was but I killed it with a reset and then started from scratch and deleted the partition and then recreated it, then reformatted. Worked like a charm and installed in ~20 min.

BTW this is one of the two the free Ultimate discs (64bit & 32bit) I got for being an MS guinea pig.

The 32bit disk key works when installing the 64bit media.

Also I didn't have any BSoD bug with my 8GB of physical memory. It just worked even with the Gold RTM version.

Then I applied the SP1 update and went out to do some errands. When I came back, it was updated and poised at the log in screen.

Random thought: Maybe the >4GB memory bug was avoided because Vista looks for updates online during the initial install process and that bug got squashed before it could rear its ugly head.

Yes, it should only take around 20 minutes. The SP1 update takes about as long with all of the reboots it does... So all in all it should be less than an hour for EVERYTHING. Wonder what kind of hang you hit. I hung on my SP3 upgrade because of AV on my XP machine, but I guess that would be a different story altogether since you were starting from scratch.