Slimming Down Vista?

[taylorwilsdon]

I've got Windows Vista installed on a 10GB partition, which is fine and great when its hooked up to an external drive or my NAS, but its difficult having 300mb free space with Vista Ultimate and Office 2007 (Word, Outlook and Excel) installed when I'm on the road.

I'm hoping to free up a gigabyte somehow. Does anybody have any tips?

[bbz_Ghost]

www.vlite.net

Strip out languages and some unneeded drivers. In fact, if you can download the proper Vista drivers for your hardware before installing Vista and have them handy on a USB drive or another partition, or burned to CD/DVD, there is almost no reason to keep any of the removable drivers from Vista at all, so yank 'em all out.

There's other stuff you can pull out also, just be careful and follow the directions as necessary. Also, check out the vLite forums for any info.

With vLite I stripped out Ultimate which natively installs to about ~10.8GB after a clean installation not counting the pagefile.

With my Vista Lite installation, Ultimate takes up ~4.8GB right after the install, not counting the pagefile.

Hope this helps...

ps
Please note that installing Vista on 10GB partition - even if you strip it out like I did - is simply bad practice. The OS needs room to breathe, and right now if you've got it installed on a 10GB partition it's choking to death, I can assure you. If you approach the 85% full mark on any partition, most especially the system partition (meaning less than 15% free space left), you're going to notice a dramatic loss of performance overall because the OS is literally choking - free space on a partition is air for an OS.

All known modern OSes and filesystems exhibit this exact same behavior, and some even warn you outright that if you breech that 85% full point, data corruption is not only very possible but very probable.

Give the OS room to breathe, and start at 15GB or 20GB just to be safe and ensure things work correctly. YMMV, so it's just a suggestion.

[duby229]

I cant help you clean out space, but what you can do is decide what you want and what you dont want at install time....

You'll have to use a program called vlite (download here (http://www.vlite.net/) to make a custom ISO image of the Windows Install CD..... Which you can decide what components will get installed and what wont and so on... It really is a golden nugget, and worth the extra time.. It has a bit of a learning curve to use this application but is worth every second of it.

[taylorwilsdon]

This is just my bootcamp setup. All I use it for is Activesync and Outlook once in a while. I don't really want to expand it past 10GB and I really don't want to reinstall, otherwise I'd use vlite or some other AIO program.

[Catweazle]

You mightn't really want to, but the simple fact is that you've made the system partition too small. Can't escape that fact, and even if you 'slim down' the installation you're still gonna end up being cramped for space sooner or later. Best to face facts and sort it out right now, rather than wait for later.

Windows likes elbow room to flex in. Hell, I wouldn't even bother putting XP on a 10Gb partition, let alone Vista. Too much stuffing about to do afterwards to keep it in functional condition in such a cramped amount of space!

[pcpal]

How do you turn off indexing?

[taylorwilsdon]

You mightn't really want to, but the simple fact is that you've made the system partition too small. Can't escape that fact, and even if you 'slim down' the installation you're still gonna end up being cramped for space sooner or later. Best to face facts and sort it out right now, rather than wait for later.

Windows likes elbow room to flex in. Hell, I wouldn't even bother putting XP on a 10Gb partition, let alone Vista. Too much stuffing about to do afterwards to keep it in functional condition in such a cramped amount of space!

I don't feel like I should have to defend my decision, but I'll do it anyways. I have about two thousand gigabytes of network attached storage as well as a whole pile of external hard drives. I use Parallels and VMware Fusion for virtualization that covers 99% of my Windows needs. However, that 1% I can use external storage. Theres just a one in a million offhand chance that I need to do something without storage, without virtualization and I'm trying to be prepared for this.

[Gatticus]

Catweazle is of the mind that anyone who does things different to him is an idiot. XP uses less than 2gb so 10gb is plenty for XP but I gave Vista 30gb.

[taylorwilsdon]

XP uses less than 2gb so 10gb is plenty for XP.

I guess I'll just install XP then. The point of this was that I didn't want to install Windows again. Oh well :(

[Riddlinkidstoner]

Can't you resize the partition from Windows with Vista now?

[taylorwilsdon]

Can't you resize the partition from Windows with Vista now?

'fraid not. Changing the partition scheme removes all my data :(. Even if I could, I'd prefer not too.

[Mansize_tissue]

Can't you just use the control panel to remove OS components?

[Catweazle]

I don't feel like I should have to defend my decision, but I'll do it anyways. I have about two thousand gigabytes of network attached storage as well as a whole pile of external hard drives. I use Parallels and VMware Fusion for virtualization that covers 99% of my Windows needs. However, that 1% I can use external storage. Theres just a one in a million offhand chance that I need to do something without storage, without virtualization and I'm trying to be prepared for this.
I wasn't so much "attacking your decision", taylorwilsdon, as making a simple statement of fact. I can recall, back when XP was initially released, Microsoft acknowledging that despite the stipulated 'minimum' requirements a system partition needed to be somewheres in excess of 10Gb to be really useful, and this time around they've simple bitten the bullet and designated a 15Gb minimum. I'd have suggested vLite to keep the install down in size but, again, that's just another Windows install anyway, isn't it?

Was it me confronted with the machine I'd be simply using a partition management tool to pinch a few Gb from the adjacent partition. Unless it's just a 10Gb drive in the machine. In that case I'd be bunging XP on it.

[eeyrjmr]

Catweazle is of the mind that anyone who does things different to him is an idiot. XP uses less than 2gb so 10gb is plenty for XP but I gave Vista 30gb.

or too Lazy (http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1030693454&postcount=24)

[taylorwilsdon]

Can't you just use the control panel to remove OS components?

Yes, I just don't know which ones to remove that won't mess with my configuration. Regardless, I think I'm just going to install XP. :D