Roshan,
1) XPe supports what XP Pro [32] does. Dual Core is certianly supported, you
may want to try the multi processor HAL component (Halmacpi.dll).
2) I you know what drivers have to be added for the newly installed devices
you can certianly add the drivers to your image config or even to runtime
manually. Although TAP approach is probably easier. Although TAP doesn't
just list PnP hardware devices, it also will record software-enumerated
devices. but I don't think this would be a concern for you if you ran TAP on
the same XPe image with the new devices and drivers added.
3) HORM - Hibernate Once Resume Many times - feature of XPe that exploits
EWF and hibernate function of XP to allow you to quickly boot (resume) your
image to a constant previously-saved state of the OS. HORM has nothing to do
with TA/TAP.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms932932.aspx
TA, compared to TAP, records all the devices enumarated and reported by the
BIOS on the target hardware. It will certain report less devices [sometimes
not even not to boot XPe image based on the TA result import] than TAP. Less
hardware and software drivers then would be added to your image if you used
the TA's pmq import. Assuming you can boot that image it will certainly boot
faster than fully resolved TAP based image.
However, you can always optimize the image footprint, memory consumtion and
boot performance even if the image is TAP based:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms932916.aspx,
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms912929.aspx.
Regards,
KM
