Creating lean/lightweight W7 installation for an SSD laptop

J

Jellylesg

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I'm having to go away for a while and am taking a laptop with a small corsair force 3 or whatever on it. 60GB or so. So I'm looking at all these suites to trim down the non-essential components I don't want (games, media center, that stuff) so I have room for a few games to play with my fiancée, and room for stuff like Word and Skype. I'm also hoping to slipstream SP1 and some drivers and the like.

I've used vLite, RT Se7en, 7Customizer, BUsomething - as many as I can find. I've been going back and forth configuring and installing AIKs and creating backup .ISOs to avoid damaging the originals and so on. Apparently none of them are actually removing anything when I configure them, since the installed size (Home Premium x64) is pretty consistently around 14.3/4GB, and all the programs I choose to remove stay on the machine.

Anyone who's done this got any ideas or suggestions? Just about tearing my hair out. The only redeeming feature is that installing from a USB drive to an SSD only takes about 5 minutes. All threads on google are a few years ago, and even finding some of these softwares was tricky due to a lot of dead links.
 
I hate the idea of stripping components out of the OS disc. Maybe remove the built-in drivers for peripherals you don't have, but nothing else.

Otherwise, the four biggest things to save you disk space will be modify the page file to do min/max size, turn off System Restore, disable hibernation, and delete the C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download folder after patching the OS.
 
Those are planned as well. I'm just surprised that this is suddenly being such a fanny, since I did it once before (same desktop to create, same target laptop) and it was perfect first time. Stripped out a lot of the superfluous, annoying shite I never used and saved a lot of space.
 
Why not just get your hands on a copy of Windows Thin PC? It's an officially supported super-slim version of Windows 7.

A clean install of Windows Thin PC uses 2.7 GB of disk space and 500 MB of RAM.
 
Unknown-One said:
Why not just get your hands on a copy of Windows Thin PC? It's an officially supported super-slim version of Windows 7.

A clean install of Windows Thin PC uses 2.7 GB of disk space and 500 MB of RAM.
Click to expand...

Never heard of ThinPC, downloading the Eval now.
 
Unknown-One said:
Why not just get your hands on a copy of Windows Thin PC? It's an officially supported super-slim version of Windows 7.

A clean install of Windows Thin PC uses 2.7 GB of disk space and 500 MB of RAM.
Click to expand...

Hadn't heard of it, thanks. It looks like x86 only which might be the only problem, but it's worth looking into.
 
Do check out the thin pc restrictions last before you get too excited there are things you will not be able to install or do.
 
Jellylesg said:
I'm having to go away for a while and am taking a laptop with a small corsair force 3 or whatever on it. 60GB or so. So I'm looking at all these suites to trim down the non-essential components I don't want (games, media center, that stuff) so I have room for a few games to play with my fiancée, and room for stuff like Word and Skype. I'm also hoping to slipstream SP1 and some drivers and the like.

I've used vLite, RT Se7en, 7Customizer, BUsomething - as many as I can find. I've been going back and forth configuring and installing AIKs and creating backup .ISOs to avoid damaging the originals and so on. Apparently none of them are actually removing anything when I configure them, since the installed size (Home Premium x64) is pretty consistently around 14.3/4GB, and all the programs I choose to remove stay on the machine.

Anyone who's done this got any ideas or suggestions? Just about tearing my hair out. The only redeeming feature is that installing from a USB drive to an SSD only takes about 5 minutes. All threads on google are a few years ago, and even finding some of these softwares was tricky due to a lot of dead links.
Click to expand...

Most likely the easyest solution for you is to upgrade the SSD instead.
 
sc0tty8 said:
Do check out the thin pc restrictions last before you get too excited there are things you will not be able to install or do.
Click to expand...
That's true of any hugely stripped-out version of Windows...

Difference is, this one is actually supported. You wont have issues with Windows Update, and the list of things that do/don't work is already known.
 
Unknown-One said:
That's true of any hugely stripped-out version of Windows...

Difference is, this one is actually supported. You wont have issues with Windows Update, and the list of things that do/don't work is already known.
Click to expand...

Windows update will work, you cannot install office, sql, .net 3.5.1, and a few other things. It is aimed at enterprise customers as a desktop replacement os to connect to rdp/vdi hosts.
 
As another poster said, I think the best solution is ultimately a larger SSD...

sc0tty8 said:
Windows update will work, you cannot install office, sql, .net 3.5.1, and a few other things. It is aimed at enterprise customers as a desktop replacement os to connect to rdp/vdi hosts.
Click to expand...
I know what it's aimed at, I also know it fits the OP's requirements on disk usage.

And yeah, Office requires Windows Search Services (and the massive disk-space-eating search index), as well as .net 3.5 in order to function. Makes sense it doesn't work when both have been ripped out :p

There's always Office Online (and in theory, the ClickToRun editions of Office 2010 and 2013 should work)
 
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