How long does it take you to reinstall GW

Okay, i am going crazy and extremely bored here, my gw.dat file was corrupted. that special screen thing that says mending or something pop up once to often, so I deleted everything and have re-installed the whole thing from my DvD on Saturday, I could log on to play a little during the weekend. Today, I went to Kamadan and found that I have to download 7k of files which took about half and hour. So I figured I better download all the image file just incase i join a PUG and other players have to wait for my slow loading. Now its 8 hours ago since I did -image and its only at 50% complete.... the total file to download was 70,000++ now there's still 30,000 ++ to download.

so how long does it take you to download everything?

*edit title to fit the question.

i am now very jealous and probably need to look for a better internet provider...

Thank everyone below for tips and suggestions.

Hour, hour and a half max..

Tip: Close EVERY other application, and kick your bro/sister in the face if they're downloading at the same time.

depends on your connection... 90minutes last time with -image starting from 0

When I install it from scratch it takes roughly an hour I'd say...that's excluding loading up the textures etc when you join certain outposts for the first time and areas all over again mind. That annoys me because everything seems so slow for the first bash!

It can take some time, but I'd say unless your computer is from the stone age, 8 hours is way too much!

About 5 minutes for the client, but it takes me about an hour to get all the updates, and another half hour to load all the explorable stuff.

I meant for the updating thing..you asked 2 different questions really. Thread title and question in post are different. About 5 mins for the client like Kendar

It took me about 4 hours for everything (-image) on a 4 MB connection

I just left mine run over night and by morning it was all done ^_^

Though the last time i had to re-install, my bf copied his gw over onto his pen drive and copied that over to mine, so it took like 15mins xDDD

The complete installation is 3.6 gigabytes.

With a 56Kbit dial up that'll take approximately 142 hours; with a 2MBbit broadband roughly 4 hours.
Having faster broadband than roughly 5MBit (e.g. I have 100MBit) doesn't help much, as the actual download speed appear to rarely exceed 400 - 700KByte/second regardless, presumably due to server restrictions.

Solution for next time:

Install guildwars from Newest campaign / expansion you have (eye of the north).
Run -image. (Copy shortcut of gw and change: "c:/program files/guild wars/gw.exe" to "c:/program files/guild wars/gw.exe" -image )
Burn the whole folder to a DVD.

I installed a " -image" of GW on my laptop a few months ago, and I think it took me around... 4 hours maybe? However, it's not the fastest thing around.

I'm not sure though, I've never had to reinstall GW from scratch on my desktop which is where I play all of my Guild Wars. I would think, however, it would be much faster since my desktop is quite a bit more powerful than my laptop.

I normaly do an -image starting from 0mb and it downloads at roughly 300k/500k but i'm no good with maths :P you can work it out though i'm sure.

I want to install GW on my laptop. What should I copy from my GW folder on my PC? The entire folder? Would a simple copy and paste work?

Took me a few hours to reinstall from scratch - but that was a while back... over a year. 3MB DSL.

Since I tend to move during summer and winter holidays, I have a backup on a portable HDD which I update every now and then. I take the file from the HDD and paste it into the other comp's HDD - took me a while last time since the computer only has 1.0 USB ports (I NEVER understood why, the comp was bought over a year ago -_-).

EDIT: @ Jagged: Yes, copying works; I copy the whole folder to make sure I don't forget anything.

Should work. My laptop was gw in its shared files anyway so al li have to do is go into my networks shared places

From the moment the CD started to run until -image closed itself was like, 45 mins.

I thought it would take longer. Especially since I had Firefox opened at the start.

too long thats why I have the dat file backed up on a dvd rw

I learned that lesson after 2 reinstalls.

Well, since i drove to Gamestop for each game and bought it in the box, it takes me 15 min to swap computers.
No idea how long it would take to download prophecies, Factions, Nightfall and Gwen, anyone have a clue?