Pretty cool BC. I like that you too are using a lower power system to reduce electric bill operating cost with that project.
I too have one of those socket AM1 systems, mine is with the Sempron 3850 Quadcore 1.3Ghz, but it was starting to lag for some reason and random crashes without reason so when the A8-5545m Quadcore 1.7Ghz with 2.7Ghz turbo build came along with far better performance. Having the faster than 1.3Ghz clock, and more CPU Cache made a big difference for slightly higher power consumption. Not sure what I am going to do with the Sempron 3850 Kabini since even with a Live Linux on USB stick it would crash and reboot. I thought power supply, swapped that out and still happened. MEMTEST86 passed too. I yanked the Gigabyte AM1 motherboard with that CPU in it and pulled the DDR3 1600Mhz RAM out of it to place into this newer A8-5545m Biostar A68N ITX motherboard and no crashes now. I figured that because the AM1 builds are so cheap that possibly corners were cut in quality on the $40 Gigabyte brand board with $35 APU and thats why after 18 months of operation running 24/7 it started to fail.
As far as installers go. I've never made an installer for any programs I have created, other than one larger project that was spanned across 4 DVD-R's for my 15.3GB Unreal Tournament 99 installer that added 14GB of maps for different deathmatch rooms as created by the community that played and continue to play and create custom maps for the game. I basically wrote a batch within C++ that used system calls to complete batch instructions and named it setup.exe at the root of the 4 DVD-R's. Not a professional installer but a cleaner looking batch process in a C++ console execution environment.
I found a website that had thousands of maps for download and instead of downloading them one by one, I used HTTrack to create an exact copy of the website for these maps which took about 4 days because I set HTTrack to a slow throttled copy so that the owner of the website wouldnt get hammered too badly with download and page requests. I then ran a batch that grabbed all the .zip files that were farmed from it. Then ran a virus scan across all these zips to make sure nothing bad in any of them. Then deleted the mirror copy of the website and then ran a script with 7-zip to unzip the gigs of maps. Then virus scan the entirety once again to double check and then go through the process of setting up the folder structure of the maps files which also had audio files and other texture contents that needed to be imported to UT99's directory structure for the game to find them all. Then decided to backup all these maps onto 4 DVD-R's with C++ wrapped batch instructions via system calls that basically xcopied the contents from the DVD-R's onto the default target directory for UT99.
Its kind of overkill to have that many maps for the game. I have only sampled maybe 40 of thousands of them so far. But I like that I have UT99 with almost every map ever made for it in my game collection now.
At some point I probably should learn how to make a installer for programs that is professional looking, but the only dependency with some programs is that .Net Framework of a specific version or newer installed to avoid error messages, and my programs are ones that I write for myself and so I know to make sure that Dot Net version 3.5 or newer is installed for example on the system that is going to run my C# program etc. Sometimes though I go to run a program of a few years ago on a clean build of XP SP3 for example and forget to update Dot Net and then the crash error is a reminder that I need to install Dot Net 3.5 to get it to execute and run properly.
I suppose a greater importance with an installer would be one that is a Windows Environment program that adds and edits registry keys and places itself properly into the Program listing of the system and registered with Windows as an installed program to single or all users, so that when no longer needed etc a clean uninstall can also be achieved.
