Create lighter, smaller custom Windows images with nLite, vLite

After taking a rare four-day break from the connected world, I'm ready to tackle XP on the Asus Eee PC. As I mentioned prior, some folks on the Eee User Forums have their XP footprint down to a svelte 687 MB. That's no small feat, so I looked deeper into the methods used and came across two great freeware applications: nLite and vLite.

nLine is a Windows application that allows you to completely customize your XP installation by letting you choose which components you want installed and then create a bootable .ISO image of your install. By including only what you need, you can keep that installation to a manageable size which is a premium for mobile devices with limited storage capacity. The theory here is: install what you need and skip the rest. Of course, you'll need a valid Microsoft Windows license to use nLite, but I see this is a very practical tool. It might not get the lighter version of Windows that mobile device users want to see but it's a small step in the right direction. Vista users will want to check out vLite, a work-in-progress version that's meant for Vista installations. One feature I like right off the bat: the app shows dependencies between features you might plan to remove.

Comments

[Brad Linder]

Yeah, I've been playing with nlite this weekend too... I went ahead and installed XP on my laptop after getting fed up with Vista.

And now I keep thinking about installing XP on my little Eee. And then I realize that it already does pretty much everything I could ever want it to. That, and I don't have a USB CD-ROM, which means I'll have to figure out how to make a bootable USB drive.

So for now I'll probably just live vicariously through your attempt. Let us know what the boot times are like once you get it running. One of the things I love about the Eee PC is how quickly it boots into KDE. But now that I'm using XP again for the first time in months I realize that it boots pretty quickly compared with Vista too.

[cr0ft]

An even cooler part than just minimizing XP with nLite is that you can create an unattended installer disc, not to mention adding drivers to the installation disc itself.

For instance, my desktop machine runs a RAID solution on the nForce chipset, and a normal XP disc doesn't have those drivers so you have to fiddle with floppies. I don't even have one of those in my computer anymore.

With nLite it was childishly easy to integrate those drivers, as well as making the disc unattended - basically, you start the installation, partition your hard drive, hit enter and go grab a coffee. When you come back, the computer will be installed as well as logged in with your personal account info as well if you installed that into the nLite image.

Great stuff.

[Joshua A. Hall]

I am looking forward to see your results. A good place to lok is at eee pc user group. The have successfully installed windows 2000. I am a big fan of windows 2000. It is smaller and is compatible with most all xp programs with the sp4 update. I read on the forum that the only problem with installing windows 2000 professional is the driver for the ssd flash drive. You have to boot in safe mode and install the driver. I have a fujitsu p1120 with a compact flash to ide adapter that is 8gb. I have office 2000 installed and foxit pdf reader and a few codecs to play video. I boots fast is silent, runs cooler and is just plain cool to run on 8GB. I like that I have support for 3g modems, windows media player, internet explorer, quicken, and other software that is not available natively on linux. I kow you can use wine for compatiblity, but it is not fully compatible.

Thanks Kevin,

P.S. Keep up the good work. I am looking forward to more post on the eee PC.

P.S.S. Have you looked into the pcie flash memory upgrade. Also the sd slot is sdhc compatible, so you can use 8gb or higher cards. I also read that you can boot from this slot.

Thanks again.

[Mike Cane]

Hmmm... I've seen Linux users brag of being able to install that OS from a flash drive. No such luck here with a lite XP?

[Joshua A. Hall]

I think you can install windows XPe on a flash drive. Windows XP embedded. I really think this would be a great os for the eee PC. It is a component version of windows. Pick only the things you need on the device. Kind of like a linux kernel. I know Steve "Chippy" Paine likes this version for the various umpc that have slower processors. It has the benefit of using less processes and also less memory footprint. The thing needed for a slower processor like the Celeron 900mhz.

Thanks,

Joshua A. Hall

[Brad Linder]

Yeah, you can definitely install XP using a flash drive... I'm just not sure I have the patience for it. :)

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=1888

[kamal]

Hi,
thanks for great tool, i used to integrate sb xtreme music drivers and nvidia drivers with it.
Kami