The Integration menu has three tabs.
If you've been in the habit of running, rather than downloading hotfixes and drivers for installation later, vLite gives you a really good reason to mend your ways.
When you select the Components category, the Compatibility Features dialog opens first. Select the components you want in the optimized image. Click each option to see which features are included. Because some components have feature overlap with others, you may be able to skip installing some features without losing functionality you need.
Click the Compatibility Applications tab to select support for Halo 2, Paint.NET, and other popular Vista programs.
Next, the main Components menu opens. Unlike the pop-up compatibility window, the Components menu is used to remove components in the following categories:
As you make selections, keep an eye on the right pane, which lists the size of each component, what it's used for, and when to keep it. Items listed in Red can cause problems if they are removed. I removed 60 components, including the entire Printers category (I prefer to download customized drivers, and I just don't need dozens of old drivers for printers I'll never see cluttering up my system). As you will see later, it makes a difference in the size of the install image.
The Tweaks menu lets you preconfigure options in four areas:
The Unattended dialog provides options for inserting your product key, accepting the EULA, providing your user name, configuring the Welcome Center, and selecting regional settings such as currency and time zone.
After making changes on these menus, click Apply, and choose what changes you want to make to the image. To create the smallest image, select the version you specified when you started the process. At the end of the process, you will have an optimized image ready to create an ISO image or bootable disc.
The ISO menu provides options for creating the image, burning it directly to a disc, splitting it across multiple discs, and configuring advanced options. My (rather modest) changes reduced the size of the Vista image to 1.8GB, down from 2.6GB. If you target a less-feature rich version of Vista and strip out more components, you can create a much smaller image. The Computerworld story I cited at the beginning of this article reports that one user crunched Vista Home Basic down to a 525MB ISO file (small enough to fit on a CD) that created a 1.3GB installation! See this forum thread for various user reports.
Before you perform your next (or first) Vista installation, take a look at vLite. Keep in mind, though, that a vLite-customized version of Vista isn't compatible with SP1. However, once SP1 starts showing up in DVD form, you'll be able to use vLite to customize and reduce it in size as much (or as little) as you want.
Comments are closed on this article
whisp
February 05, 2008 at 3:58pm
ill most likely be trying this utility as i realllly need to reformat, just been dreading/procrastinating it
vintagegold
February 04, 2008 at 6:21pm
Any chance we can see a similar run through for XP, considering SP3 is out? It would be much appreciated. :~)
Marcus_Soperus
February 04, 2008 at 9:54pm
I'll give nLite a spin at integrating SP3 into Windows XP SP2 when it's available as a final product. Thanks for asking.
---------------------------------------
It's amazing how illogical a business built on binary logic can be.
McB
February 02, 2008 at 3:58am
and it did wonders for me. I added the nVidia 680i raid drivers and it was the only way I could install Vista x64 bit on a new computer build. Definitely worth checking out.
Print
