Creating custom windows install

[divine]

I love nlite.
I remember messing around to see just how small i could make a CD and install footprint on an old PC, you'd be surprised how much total crap you can strip from XP and have it still work fine!

[Feek]

I use nlite along with the Windows Update Downloader to sort out the updates and shoehorn them in.

[Stan_Lite]

Originally Posted by divine`

I love nlite.
I remember messing around to see just how small i could make a CD and install footprint on an old PC, you'd be surprised how much total crap you can strip from XP and have it still work fine!

I'm going to do that with XP pro to put on the Eee. I've ordered 2Gb RAM for it so I can do away with the swap file altogether and I want to strip down XP to the bare minimum so that I can have Office and other stuff on there I'll need without pushing the 4Gb SSD too close to the limit. Storage will be on 16Gb SD cards.

[Mark]

Didn't know you could easily slipstream in Windows Updates, otherwise I'd have done it with my XP MCE CD rebuild.

[MarcLister]

Originally Posted by Bigstan

I used nlite to slipstream SP2 into XP back in the day.

IIRC, it works pretty much as Flibster said. You copy the contents of your Windows CD to a folder, point nlite at it, tell it what to remove and what to add and it should automagically do the business.

Been a long time since I used it too. Might actually get it to slipstream SP1 into Vista for future installs.

It's called vLite. nLite for XP/2000 and vLite for Vista.

Originally Posted by Zirax

Aha! Got it now, wasn't entirely with it late last night. I have had another look and you can even point it at windows update and it gets it all automatically o/

Cracking stuff, it'll save about an hour of pulling down updates post sp2.

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The final uber ness would be putting office 2003 on there as part of the windows install (hey, i'm lazy).

I use the RyanVMupdate pack. Ryan took a break last year but has just returned.

http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn/updatepack-sp2.html

Download that and integrate it into nLite and your copy of XP is pretty up-to-date patch wise.

[Zirax]

Thanks all. It seems that you can slipstream the office 2003 cds onto an office cd with the same for windows. My plan of creating the uber windows install seems to have stopped though, I was thinking office, avg, zonealarm, ati drivers all installed via one cd.

Still I am getting everything together to do one big install, it saves a lot of time waiting for windows to update

[MarcLister]

Originally Posted by Zirax

Thanks all. It seems that you can slipstream the office 2003 cds onto an office cd with the same for windows. My plan of creating the uber windows install seems to have stopped though, I was thinking office, avg, zonealarm, ati drivers all installed via one cd.

Still I am getting everything together to do one big install, it saves a lot of time waiting for windows to update

That is my holy grail of computing. Being able to install XP + updates + programs.

[LeperousDust]

vLite doesn't work with SP1 yet, because Microsoft have released a distribution version or whatever.

[Zirax]

Well putting the cd together wasn't that bad really. What was painful was extracting the driver .inf files from the various installers. Now thats done I have a complete build cd that will work entriely without prompting and build from scratch.

Then I found out that I need to upgrade the bios before the machine will post with this new intel chip :/