Why does Norton Ghost seem faster than the Windows XP Installer?

I got some restore CD’s from eMachines last night, to repair my home PC that I’d manage to royally screw up somehow. The three CD’s were a Norton Ghost image, and what amazed me was how quickly it seemed to blast all the files over onto the hard drive. Way faster than when I’d tried to use a standard Windows XP Install CD on this same PC.

Now I know the Windows XP Install is having to do stuff that Norton Ghost doesn’t have to do. Hardware detection, network setup, stuff like that. But just in terms of the file-copying process it seemed to me that Ghost was much faster at moving files onto the hard drive than the Windows XP Install.

Has that been your experience? And if so why is Ghost able to be so much faster at file-copy?