The answer is time and customization. A standard Windows XP installation takes 45 minutes, followed by 2-3 hours of driver hunting, Windows Updates (servers are offline now), and installing legacy software.
Businesses used ghosting servers to deploy identical software suites to hundreds of workstations simultaneously. How the Ghosting Process Worked windows xp ghost
For the uninitiated, "Ghosting" refers to taking an exact snapshot—a clone—of a hard drive or a partition. The term became synonymous with , a now-discontinued disk cloning utility. Today, "Windows XP Ghost" broadly means creating a pre-configured, bootable image of Windows XP that can be deployed to multiple machines in minutes. The answer is time and customization
Unnecessary background services were removed to make the OS run faster on old hardware. Integrated Drivers: How the Ghosting Process Worked For the uninitiated,
He tried the second machine. Same result. The third? A black screen with a lonely, unmoving cursor.
Legitimate use of Ghost required Microsoft Sysprep (System Preparation Tool) to generalize the installation (remove SID, computer name, driver cache) so the image could be deployed to different hardware.