How To: Streamline and Customize your Vista Installation

Posted 04/24/2008 at 5:32pm | by Mark Edward Soper

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3. Add a Side of Hotfixes and Drivers

The more hotfixes you add to Vista SP1 now, the fewer you’ll need to install later.

Now you’re in the Integration menu’s Hotfixes tab. If you’re customizing Vista SP1, you will see already-integrated hotfixes, but you can add additional hotfixes introduced post-SP1. (To locate them, go to www.microsoft.com/downloads and search for updates for Windows Vista SP1. Be sure to save, rather than run, hotfixes.) Click Insert, navigate to the folder containing the hotfixes you want to add to the installation, select them, and click Open.

To add drivers, click the Drivers tab. Use the Insert button and navigate to the appropriate folders to add drivers, which then appear at the bottom of the dialog.

Note that drivers included as a standard part of Vista or Vista SP1 are not listed. To add language packs, click the Language Pack tab. The current language in use is listed. Use the Insert button and navigate to the appropriate folders to add language packs. Click Next.

4. Kick Unwanted Features to the Curb

The Compatibility dialog opens next. Within the Features tab you can deselect the Vista features you want to remove. (We kicked Scanners and Cameras and Windows Fax and Scan to the curb, since we’ll eventually use third-party apps for picture transfer and scanning.)

The Applications tab lists a few popular third-party apps that depend on Vista components, such as ACDSee/XnView and Halo 2. If you plan to install a listed application, click the empty check box next to it. Keep in mind that checked items will be included in the Vista installation image. Click OK to continue.

5. Remove Components to Slim Vista

Selecting components to remove can be tricky. Keep an eye on the Help window to the right for suggestions and warnings.

The Components dialog can be tricky. Unlike the Compatibility dialog, the Components dialog is used to remove components in particular categories, such as accessories, drivers, and hardware support. Checked items will be removed from your image. As you select each item, a help dialog on the right side of the display lists the size of the item, what it does, and under what situations it should be kept. Items that can be particularly dangerous to remove are listed in red type.

We removed Paint, Snipping Tool, and Wordpad from Accessories (they won’t be missed), almost all items in the Driver category except for some storage controller listings (we’ll install updated video drivers ourselves), all games (Vista’s games are pretty lame), fax and iSCSI support from the Hardware Support category, Asian language support from the Languages category, sample files from the Multimedia category, and IIS from the Network category. We kept all of the services.

The original Windows Ultimate installation includes 172 total items. We selected 68 for removal. Once you have your list ready, click Next to continue.