Hi,

I was wondering if Any of you guys have a way to make thelightest of xplite? there are some service and other stuff that are on there in the component that i dont know if i need or not. I have a pretty good idea of what to delete but I just dont want to delete the wrong stuff.

Thanks,

KF1975

Do you have any idea how brutally this topic has beaten and maimed to death in the last 5 years? Do yourself a favor and search. There's got to be dozens of topics on this forum alone...
Welcome to MSFN.

so... youre saying that theres a lot of information of this stuff?

can you do a search for me and post it in this thread?

No - but you can do it yourself. Just type the words in the search box at the top of the page.

the smallest xp ive seen was only an 88 meg cd

ok i tried to serach but nothing comes up. i typed "lite xp. smallest xp. what not to delete. things to delete, how to create a lite disc" and so on.. but nothing is coming up. well nothing tthat im looking for. I just want to know which files are safe to delete that wont screw up the operating systems stability. seriously, any help would be appreciated.

One word nLite!

It is in the forum sections...

I just made a 81 meg XP iso right now...

59.6 megs 2000 w/sp5 iso...

so what did you exclude to get it to be 81 megs? did you lose all network features?

I stripped everything out so yeah networking is prolly gone... (Will test tonight though) It was just an example of what nLite can do.

well sure yo ucan strip everything down to its bare minimum but whats the point of stripping everything down when you can have certain features like networking, file browsing, printer support, and other features.

is there a list of stuff thats okay to delete and not okay to delete? i see a description in NLite but those descriptions aren't enough. it explain what it does but some doesn't explain what its being used for.

If you are unsure what it is used for, do not remove it. Granted that there is a lot of legacy functionality in Windows that is replaced by 3rd party utilities, but people who try to go the extra mile usually always come back with something not working properly and wonder if there is a way to fix it without redoing the entire process. The answer is no. You can remove unneeded languages, keyboard layouts, drivers and multimedia components and reduce your ISO a good 60-70%. That's all I do nowadays. I don't remove any Services. I just disable them and if I receive any errors in my Event Log Viewer, I re-enable some.
The true benefit to performance is making sure you have good hardware, a clean system (CCleaner), a defragmented HDD and lightweight software that doesn't take up enormous amounts of resources (Norton for example).

I guess you mean:


Don't you?



jaclaz

well about about crap like speech and narrator and stuff like that. i have removed laungauges keyboard stuff but hwo about drive utlilies? Can i completely remove all drivers (except LAN driver) since everything can be taken online?

Those are under Accessories. You can remove all drivers that you either have no use for or ones for which you'll be integrating your own.

I personally use nlite to remove completely those components that I will never use.

After that I use Bold Fortune's guide to delete remaining unneeded files. I recommend this only if you are willing to devote some time to understand what each file does.

On getting a small iso practice makes perfect. Take small steps and tesr the iso before you burn it to a cd.

The better place for this is the nLite forums.

And for what it's worth, I've made a 90-ish MB ISO, but it was pretty much useless...

Moved to nLite forums.

basic guide..

copy your xpcd to c:\xpcd

install nlite, point it at the c:\xpcd folder and begin



xplite is for reducing windows AFTER install, nlite is for doing it before install

Another thing to look at (hard) when stripping down XP is what your end result will be for the effort invested.

Bragging rights and education/learning about how MSFT does things and new ways of doing them is always valuable. Always.

But after two and a half years of doing this I'm still not convinced. Other than the 'fun factor', the hugely valuable education factor, and the sheer convienence of all of the pre-loads and reg tweaks, I don't believe that I've gained much beyond what I usually get with a careful mangling of services startup settings.

My .iso is about 1.3 Gb and it's 50% stripped/modded/AddOn & driver laden XP and the other 50% is my standard applications mix and recovery tools. I'm happy with that result. Other people aren't happy until they can get an XP install/recovery environment on to a 150 Mb mini-CD. Nice thing is that everyone gets to play.

However (and these are sure to be unpopular opinions):

Fitting everything on a CD-R? In these days of near-universal DVD boot drives on machines, the old rationale of stripping XP to 'enable' the pre-loading of lots of applications and still fit the thing on to a 700Mb CD-R are gone.

Security? Other than setting some services to manual or disabled, pre-loading all of the MSFT patches, and pre-loading some anti-virus, what else is there that isn't more properly handled with some basic network-level security. Remember that it is security in layers, not a single brick wall that takes care of problems.

reload/install times? On a P4-2.8 and 512 Mb ram my combo RvM (30+ addons), nlite, & BtS DVD can be booted and installed in less than 20 minutes including a full NTFS reformat of hdd0. Dual core and more ram does not speed that up. Things that I manually install after that take another 30 mins. Some people claim to go from bare-metal to fully working machine in 15 minutes but their definition of fully-working is for their purposes, not mine.

Boot times? Is a reduction of 2-5 seconds on a cold boot worth weeks of test/install/vmware time?

System performance? System performance these days is gated almost wholly by the sustained transfer rates of your disk drives and how those drives connect to your system. After boot time, a stripped down XP isn't that much 'snappier' than stock. With reasonably modern video, you don't gain more than a single-digit handful of 'fps' for gaming. Things like seti and folding gain nothing from a stripped down XP; if that kind of performance is what you need you are better off with a linux distro anyway.

Remember that there is a bare minimum config for XP below which you lose networking, themes, support for anything but totally-generic hardware, high-performance video/audio (games, multimedia), and other stuff. Jeremy (among dozens of others) has done a lot of good work in that area over the past 3 years. Have a good look around for the various Last Session.ini files people have posted.

The key to XP iso building/hacking is to set your expectations appropriately and test the hell out of it in a VMWare/VirtualPC environment before trying to 'go live'. You'll probably spend 3-4 hours on each test iteration and with a lot of tweaks/removals/addons, expect dozens of test iterations.

maybe im stupid, but a ........ maybe you just better like, eighter full strip the *#$%# thing and than start experiencing the problems and look up " nlite what not to remove for myapp " and look that up in google. .. or jou just go an play outside with tha kiddies...

any way YOU have to find a good config for YOU and it you find that APP xyz does work with your config try to search first and ask than.... it took Me about a 5moths to find out what i can and cant remove and today still i use RW cd's to test my nlite.iso's first befor i burn them...

Hey, Kels, can u gime the link for Windows 2000 SP5 link?

remove all

Sorry but it is torrent only right now go here --> http://tracker.ryanvm.net/ to find it...

Care to share your settings?

Actually it is easy just select everything for removal.

OK I have to play devils advocate a bit here and say, its silly to ask
"what can I remove without losing any functionality" because if you're
removing something then you are losing functionality! OK languages,
fair enough, you don't need languages but apart from that... everything
in Windows is there for a reason.

I dunno about XP but I run Server 2003 and I swear to god, my games run
faster on the full one! Maybe its because removing stuff just confuses the OS
sometimes, meaning its not running so smooth?

I have found that if you start going below about 200Mb to 220Mb, then you
start having to lose some functionality, like Printing, Jet Database,
MDAC, Cameras.

I guess I could post a Last Session... but I cant be assed, its so late its early here.

Making a small XP CD sounds cool but it rarely works like you want it to. Variations in XP CDs mean that every alteration has a chance to fudge up yer new installation.

I use nLite to make GUI Unattended CDs and that's it. I can always come in after the fact and perform the tweaks and silent installs I need.

When it comes down to it, it's not about the smallest install CD - just what applications and updates you choose afterwards.

I got a Windows XP SP2 CD down to 400mb. I stripped it of all the languages and keyboards but English/united states. I also went in and disabled hibernate, and system restore. I also set some services to disabled such as search, index, firewall, etc, and SFC to speed up installation. I also added a default workgroup and company, along with a key. The CD is 400mb with RyanVM update pack 2.1.8, addons, directx, and framework 1.1, and 2.0. I also added a 40mb folder called goodies which include a theme and some other stuff.

Haven't tried it yet, but it should work.

I was thinking that maybe you haved like a list of keep important files.

Removing everything and creating a very slim copy of Windows doesn't make any sense.
You're going to work on the PC and not just using it for Task Manager screenshots right?

Read a lot, try to understand what every single component is used for and then remove the useless components with nLite.
Then test, test, test, after a few tries you will have the best Windows installation CD adapted to your needs.

I will say this again...

At some point in the future, we will probably be able to strip the NT 5.x / 6.0 kernel clean and operate it in Recovery Console, even without the GUI or any drivers (meaning ~15 Mb of memory being used). I would like to point out that, unless you are building yourself some kind of high-tech network driven headless server thingy, this is completely without purpose for any normal windows user.

For example, the Microsoft Singularity OS project is exactly at this point of development. It works. But you can't do anything on it.

Just FYI, the tiniest of the Winbuilder project, PicoXP, can be considered a step in that direction, currently you can build a 14 Mb boot CD with basic CMD.EXE support.
"Bigger" projects range in 30÷70 Mb sizes.

A simple description and all needed links in this post by the main developer of WinBuilder, Nuno Brito:
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?sho...=19586&st=2

jaclaz

I don't think having the smallest XP is stupid. Of course the smallest xp represents less functionality.

Just a point here: mojopac is small but works well, so why not have a small XP and run it trough ramdrive using the QEmu Emulator (I'm always running DamnSmallLinux ISO Image with Qemu in my Windows XP computer at work, because i don't have Adm. Permissions).

We have to separate 2 diferent situations and be clear/aware of them:

1. Install XP under a pendrive and Boot XP though pendrive: this could be a full xp with ALL functionality that you want.

2. Have a Small XP (very small, less than 30 Mb) and run it with QEmu in RamDrive (Virtual ISO Image): very small functinality but the users are aware of that and accept this condition. The users wants this XP_RamDrive just to surf the net under a secure connection (no virusses), download/sync the outlook messages, run some small aplications and nothing much more than that. But nevertheless, is very interesting to have this ability. That's why mojopac (ringcube inc.) is team up with microsoft.

It would be interesting try to discover what components, drivers, etc, etc does mojopac have, so we could duplicate it with a nBuilt/XPLite xp version. This would be an interesting project. Or we could even do better and build a better small XP.

I think that a Small XP needs to have no more than 30MB so it can run in 256MB Ram computers (I've seen the post of 16MB in 911cd, but I'm really lost). So what can we remove?? What is really necessary to have?

What you need is a better description tied to the removable components within nlite. I have asked for this many times to no avail.

Is someone that knows them now willing to go through nlite and tie everything that you can remove to a better description and to the what not to remoive for some apps topic?

We need it all in one place. All of this information is in to many places on msfn, and thats why the same questions get asked and asked and asked again. If we then tie all of that with what bold fortune has done (his stuff is very organized)can can easyly make a small xp/2003 disc with no problems.

just my 2 cents

I also made that much stripped windows xp sp2 with nlite! I installed it on virtualpc but alas! The window failed to boot even after complete installation! There was an error message- I could not note down.

The problem may be that I deleted some required components. I tried once again with a bigger windows- 300MB now-- and I was successful in this attempt.

It proves that nlite is a really amazing tool to make lite windows xp but we have to be careful regarding components removal.

Cheers!

to get this the best way i think:

Is nlite able to to remove all noninstalled components that are not on the current (semi clean) install and/or also able to remove all noncritical components (keep ide/agp/CPU/chipset ect. ect.) to keep the install running smooth?


oh and about the search, get the real (onboard) search engine.
"powed by google" is most time messing up the search resaults if you using that one

I have a tested 95mb disc that works perfectly. It will run and do everything I need it to do. Then I have an untested 85mb disc that I have to wait until I'm done with night classes at college to test out.

I use nLite to strip everything I don't need out and then use Bold_Fortune's guide to get ride of more stuff.