before HFSLIP, i had a hard core group of ie haters from 2001 to 2004 or so. i had 250 hits a day maybe. i got probably 5 e-mails a month from people IE removers who were new to the project, mostly hobbyists with low-end laptops that couldn't run XP. i get about 5 fanmails a week from non-MSFN'ers now, just saying thanks. word is spreading, thanks to search engines, and thanks to all of you who post and advocate for us in other communities outside of MSFN.

out of nowhere hfslip gathered momentum and in about one month it became THE solution for slipstreaming windows 2000. the OS's fell into place. xp in february, finalized in april. 2003 in august, finalized in august. language support, new hotfixes, patch oddities, error reporting, iso creation were all added from september to november, and file removal (heavily tested by oleg_ii) was made public. driver integration and file replacement made their debut around the same time. MSFN users fueled the project to an incredible degree with bug swatting, testing, code edits and suggestions, modest requests, and patience with us while we pounded out new fixes and new versions.

the thing is, this has all been within these past few months. the windows 2000 process alone got 8,070 hits in november. to put that in perspective, in 2004, it took me 4 months to get that many hits on that page. that's not just removing IE -- the hfslip page got 6,086 hits in november. the site had 18,382 unique visits (so some folks aren't reading past the first page, but that's only about 4,000 people as opposed to the 14,000 that DID. for whatever reason, i get about 1,000 mac users and about 200 or so linux users visiting a month. maybe they're lucky enough to have macs at home?)

browser stats ... Firefox and opera are on the rise.
hits by MSIE 6.0: 205694
hits by Netscape 5.x: 106630 (the web software reports mozilla, seamonkey, and firefox as "Netscape")
hits by Internet Explorer 5.x: 8183
hits by Opera/8.50: 3906 (only this version, there are a scattered hundreds with earlier versions)

A Worldwide Audience
some of our top referrers:
http://www.nliteos.com/links.html
http://www.google.co.uk/search
http://www.stopie.com/removingie/
http://search.yahoo.com/search
http://www.google.com.au/search
http://www.google.nl/search
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx
http://www.google.fr/search

by a LONG shot, the top search term in all search engines is "hfslip" followed by "slipstream xp" and "windows 2000 sp5".

There were 2,248 downloads of HFSLIP in November 2005, and 809 of my fileset.

on behalf of myself and our favorite in-house rocket scientist tommyp our thanks go out to everyone who has helped bring us so far, so fast, and the enthusiasm and evangelism you've all done.
happy upcoming new year to all...

and if ya wanna raise a glass and meet tom, fred, and saugatak on december 28th, you still can, just PM us

I echo FDVs posts with the thank-you's. HFSLIP started because I hated worthless files after installing W2K, hotfixes and IE6 using traditional methods. Also, people everywhere said that slipstreaming IE6 into W2K is impossible, but I proved them wrong about a year ago. So over the coarse of a year, lots of goodies were incorporated: full localization, XP and 2K3 among other things that other programs just can't do. The XP and 2K3 are no brainers and slipsteaming them is only a SMALL subset of W2K. This is why I get a kick out how people make mountains out of molehills with XP and 2K3 slipstreaming. Let's see what happens next year.

I'm not suprised. This thing is the best of its kind.

Thanks!