With a beta operating system, you will usually get two formats of the beta product - staged and unstaged. These are the types of installation they have, and they are very different and should be treated differently.

 Unstaged installations are how Windows installs itself previously. You start the setup, enter in your product key and leave it going. The installation copies the files from the CD/DVD onto the hard drive, and then the registry is installed and configured, and then the files are all registered and Windows kicks up. If you will, call an “unstaged installation” a “standard installation”.

 Staged installations are different to unstaged installations. These types of installations are simply images of which directly gets unpacked onto a machine without any of the registry building. Some people call this “ghosting”, but it’s the same thing. It comprises of very basic configuration, and drivers and settings for common hardware types, but always directly comparable to the hardware of which the ghosted staged image was collected from. For example, if the ghosted staged image was created on a 64-bit machine, it could only be installed then on another 64-bit machine. These installations take much lesser time to install and can normally be installed within about 65% of the time of an unstaged installation.