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1) Installation is no longer a pain in the ass. With all the new hardware coming out XP is increasingly in need of extra drivers before install. On a floppy disk... and only a floppy disk.

you might want to try http://nliteos.com/ to add drivers to your windows installation. it will only work if you can get the inf files so you can add them to the disc, but some drivers can be extracted with winzip or 7zip and the like. there is also a good bit of community support on the forums

Ah, but you CAN slipstream SP1 now.

I just looked at the XP sister tool page and they have support for the latest XP SP3 refresh so it's a good bet they'll support it in 1.4.5 final.

nLite: http://www.nliteos.com/ and there's vLite for vista.

How are you Gentlemen!! Perhaps you would be interested in my comparison of memory footprints The results may surprise you. Windows 2000 with SP5 has a slightly larger memory footprint than Windows XP without any service packs or updates installed. Due to the vastly larger memory requirements for Windows XP I always assumed that this would not be the case. It is only the service packs and other updates that make windows XP into the memory hog that it is. In the beginning it was (relatively) lean and mean. This threw me at first.

Actually it is mainly Asus's own lack of motherboard drivers for windows 2000 for my new motherboard that finally forced me to 'upgrade' from windows 2000 to XP. Although Razer has also dropped the ball by not supplying win2k drives for my new Diamondback 3G mouse. It seems that is really these vendors and not microsoft that truly force upgrades to their newer operating systems.

I am surprised no one has mentioned nlite or the torrents available for pre nlited versions.

Maybe it's time for Damn Small Windows.

On my EEEPC I trimmed my XP disk right down to 250MB~ with nLite (http://www.nliteos.com/), the thing could run with 128MB RAM and a couple of hundred MHz processor speed. The EEE has 512 RAM and a 900Mhz Celeron M (P4 1.8 equiv), so excellent performance.

What about http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/sa/benefits/fundamentals.mspx?

My point is, you wouldn't try and run KDE and OpenOffice on a less-than optimal hardware-wise machine, so why would you try and run the vanilla XP disk?

Ever heard of nLite or vLite? They let you build your [u]own[/u] XP/Vista ISOs with update, service pack and additional driver integration as well as literally every customization you can think of. So, yes, this is nothing exactly new, and I'd rather prefer my own customization.

This thing is excellent. Add the updates to your xp cd with Nlite to take it one step further for those fresh installs. http://www.nliteos.com/

He might mean nlite, which I think is the same thing as vlite but for XP.

FYI: I'm not the OP.

http://www.nliteos.com/

I'm doing an nLited XP on the EEE. Boot time is less tha 30 seconds. You'll need a valid XP license, and the XP installation files. You'll run nLite, select which packages you want to include in your XP install, and nLite copies only the files you need to a target device or ISO file.

From there, you create your own install media (a CD in my case) and do a plain vanilla XP install.

It's probably possible to dual boot Xandros, but I wasn't pleased enough with Xandros to bother. What really kills this though is the small storage size of anything but the 8G unit. The default Xandros left very little disc space on my 4G. Certainly not enough to put XP next to it.

Just FYI, for those that are contemplating an XP upgrade/downgrade/lateral redeployment/whatever, I *highly* recommend Nlite - it's a program for making XP install CD's with whatever you need to rip out culled, whatever device drivers et al.

There are features I never mastered - you can set it up to install your drivers, default programs, etcetera, and such - I've never gone farther than saving my 'must have' programs and drivers on the CD so I can install them when I need them, but you can do lots more, and you can rip out all sorts of XP detritus and have a really nice, fast os. Great for your game partition (Sorry, wine is great for some things, but it sucketh much on many).

Pug

Ooh, well I've got a great piece of software for you. This software changed my whole user experience. Its called nLite, and in a nutshell it lets you rip your Windows CD to your hard drive, open up the installation files, tear out all unwanted elements, repackage it and burn it into a new installation CD. I've been running my own version of Windows for a couple years now. I pre-set all my preferences (so on a fresh install, sound FX are off by default, as one example), preinstalled certain drivers, pre-installed my Service Packs, obliterated any trace of Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, and MSN. It's also a hands-free installation, so you can just drop it in your drive and let it go on it's own for most of the way.
Probably the best part I like about this app is that it actually gives you a breakdown on what each section of Windows does, so you know what you're taking out. It has great, simple information on each component, and if it's critical to windows operation or not (so you don't create a monster that doesn't even boot).

http://nliteos.com/

And if you want to go a step further you can always get some disc-cloning software like Ghost or something, and just make a clone of your drive after a fresh install.

Use nlite to remove unwanted mess and integrate the drivers for your hardware into a new installation cd.
I haven't used it to integrate drivers myself, but removing useless crud makes a real difference.

Microsoft should look at nLite or XPlite. If They can shrink xp you would think Microsoft could do it too!
XPlite claims it can do a 350MB install.

Make a slipstream disc for your particular computer. It's possible to download all the patches and roll them into an XP install so that the installer dumps an updated version of XP to your disc. You can even install drivers and software from that same disc without any human intervention whatsoever. There's about 150MB of free space on the SP2 CD, and it's even possible to install XP from a DVD meaning that you can roll some games and all of your software and drivers and patches into your install without running out of space.

I'm having trouble finding the non-shitty hotfix guide that I used for this install, but there's a program called nLite which can integrate hotfixes and drivers with the installer. There are also some good tools in one of the directories on your XP install disc which can write basic unattended setup files for you.

But installing a fresh XP and having to install 80 odd updates is a PITA.

It sure is.. that's why you either slipstream the updates into your installation disc, or create a standard image using the sysprep utility. Even for a small sized business it doesn't make sense to do a clean install of XP on every machine. It takes too much time and is a waste of company resources.

Meet nLite! ;) http://www.nliteos.com/

:-)

Use NLite.

http://www.nliteos.com/

nLite will solve your problem. With it you can slipstream a full Windows installation disk, plus patches, plus any drivers that you would otherwise need to install. You can even remove chunks that you don't need.

I do take issue with some of your points though. Your knowledge of the DOS/Win32 operating environment is no doubt something that you have accumulated slowly over a number of years. I too found the unix command line unfamiliar and painful when I first used it. I'm still a novice, but I now find it more productive than cmd.exe by an order of magnitude.

I found installing and using Gentoo to be a great learning experience. The lack of a graphical installer (at the time) forces you to use the command line for everything. If you follow the install manual "blind" you pick up a few things. If you go through it reading the manuals for every command you use, you pick up a lot of things. I didn't get along with the graphical distributions at the time, I couldn't find any of the options I wanted. They have improved, but my TV server still runs Gentoo since it was the only distribution that supported my hardware at the time.

Your old hardware is much more likely to be supported than newer hardware.

As for games? I'm not going to chime in with the rest of the people in this thread and claim you can use Linux to run them all. I like to play games. I intend to keep running Windows until I give them up (which may well happen, they innovate less every year), or until Linux versions are commonplace.

As a software developer, I also can't do without Windows. I depend on Windows, because it's where most of my code lives. But I love open-source. I'm lucky enough to be doing a job where I don't have to avoid it - I can use what I like. And if I have to pick and choose, using OSS tools are just overall much less hassle. I don't have to requisition them, justify purchase costs, fill in forms, wait thirteen weeks for approval. If they have bugs, I don't have to contact the supplier and engage in complex political games about who's fault it is, I just fix them. OSS for me is just far more agile and productive.

Instead of starting a flamewar like the other comment to your post, I will actually try to include some information.

I maintain a custom XP Pro disc. I use nLite to apply these custom changes. I purchased XP Pro w/SP2 at one point for a friends computer that I built. The only options that are not pre-set on the custom disc is the serial number that I force new computer users to buy because I'm not a large advocate of piracy (I, personally, use Gentoo Linux in my home). I update the disc every so often (usually once a month) to apply new Windows Updates, etc. I use the RyanVM's XP post SP2 update pack.

:-)

Canada is looking better every day.

On the note of Microsoft and their anti-trust activities, I have to say that I'm not too concerned with what Microsoft chooses to include or not include in their products, as there are always tools like nLite that allow you to cut out the cludge you don't want in your system. I myself have been using a very useful copy of Windows XP that has been reduced down to a mere 250MB ISO.

Of course, that's for people who don't pay for their software. For Joe Citizen, who orders up a new PC from $OEM_OF_CHOICE, it's a different story.

As slick? No, definitely not. But with a WSUS server on a private subnet, it's going to do what you want.

You can also slipstream hotfixes in to XP, then burn that as an installable ISO. Check out nLite for more information on that.

Lastly, Microsoft USED to offer CDs with the latest patches so that you could install them without connecting to the network. Not sure if they still do that, though.

I have found that a combination of Heise Security's ctupdate and nLite can be used to create a very nice custom Windows installation CD that not only includes any updates you choose to include, but you can also specify a large number of custom registry settings that will be set when you install.
Is very nice

http://www.nliteos.com/ is your friend for slipstreaming - they also have links to patch rollups (of course, you'll have to take their word that they don't shaft you on that)

Yeah, unless you run into this problem

It doesnt take any effort at all if you use nLite http://www.nliteos.com/
If you cant do it using that then there is no hope for you.

http://www.nliteos.com/

1) Download nLite
2) Download your SATA drivers
3) Burn nLite with your SATA drivers, graphic drivers etc all installed
4) ????
5) Profit!

I don't have a floppy drive in my desktop. To get around my SATA drives needing the drivers for Windows, I've always used nLite.

Why, yes! Of course there is! There are two ways to go about this:
1. Install XP, then all the patches later, and manually.
2. "Slipstream them" -- replace the files on the XP CD with the newer ones. nLite http://www.nliteos.com/ is pretty good for this stuff.

If you want to download all the patches so that you can slipstream them or install them later, AutoPatcher http://www.autopatcher.com/ is the way to go.

If you have a Windows server somewhere, WSUS is a good option (though somewhat heavier).

1) Copy cab files from your original Windows installation CD/DVD
2) Incorporate service packs & hot fixes
3) Incorporate your RAID/SATA drivers (no more hitting F6 andinstalling a floppy drive JUST to load windows) and any device drivers (Video/Sound/other hardware) you'd like
3) Specify every setting you'd like; for example: What options do you want to appear on the start menu? What IP address would you like on your NIC? What screen resolution would you like on your desktop? What is your product key? nLite lets you set an amazing number of these
4) Recompress all of the above down to a new bootable image

If any of the above sounds scary, don't worry... nLite walks you through everything. The first time you do this, it takes a while to set everything up. However nLite allows you to import setting from previous sessions, so you can hit the ground running next time around. On subsequent loads, it can save a good number of hours and reboots. There is even a new version for Vista that I have yet to try... I forced myself to use Vista for one week and went screaming back to XP. (Woo hoo! Startin' a thread!)

Brian

but just the process of securing a Windows reinstall can take days, unless you have the time to babysit the whole thing.

It doesn't have to. This process need only be done once, sorta.

To answer the question posed by the summary:

How long do you have to fiddle with computer until you have it set up the way you like? Do you use any shortcuts to speed up the process?"

Absolutely. Go check out nLite. It's a tool that allows you to customize your Windows installation CD to your tastes. You can hack out all the extraneous garbage that comes with Windows, as well as slipstream hotfixes and service packs into the installations process (no more re-updating with Windows Update each time a system wipe occurs). Also, you can automate the installation process and do some simple setup on how Windows behaves visually.

I reinstalled Windows off of my nLited installation CD last week. The whole process, from beginning the installation to me actually having the system back to where I like it took under an hour (and a decent portion of that time was me manually doing some post-installation tweaks that could have been part of the nLite installation; I just haven't generated a new installation CD recently).

Also, removing all of the unnecessary garbage from Windows makes it a very sleek OS, indeed. My installation ISO that nLite produced is a mere fraction of the size of the stock Windows installation ISO. I've clocked months of uptime with absolutely no issues (please, no comments on how much better Unix/Linux is with uptime....we know). The boot process is under 20 seconds from power button press to Windows desktop. Shutdown is faster.

So yeah, check it out. It's definitely worth the time.

Now the individual post-last-SP patches, those are a pain to do offline mainly because there are so many of them.

Building an XP box, even from SP2 media, requires over 75 patches in our environment.

That's because you don't know what you're doing. You can set up a RIS server and slipstream the updates into your OS image or use nlite and build a custom install CD with all of the updates already there. Nlite also lets you integrate extra drivers and tweaks tons of settings, it's really nice.

Get it at http://www.nliteos.com/

> Windows is an order of magnitude or two larger than this OS

More like a magnitude of 10... AOS4 iso = ~50 MB... XP Pro iso = ~500-600 MB, IIRC.

There's a lot of stuff in XP that most people will never use. You can reduce the footprint of XP to about 12 MB - this will load in seconds, but you won't be able to do anything!!

Of course, you don't have to go to this extreme - you can take out just the bits you know you wont need (like extra language / keyboard support and some of the more obscure drivers, etc) using nLite to strip it from your install cd, or XPLite to remove carp from an existing installation.

I'm not hugely technical or nothing, but I found http://www.nliteos.com/ to integrate service packs
had to use it to integrate raid drivers for install on an Nforce4 board without a floppy.

Even better is to make an unattended install disk (using a tool like nlite, or following the directions from a site like http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/) which includes the proper service pack, drivers AND registry tweak.

Indeed, most of these problems come from the vendors with support staff that are indifferent to such specific problems.

However, it's easy to integrate drivers into a Windows XP CD, be it OEM, retail, VLM, etc, if you've got the INFs (and supporting files). That way, you're able to use the OEM CD with the OEM key and still get it to recognize the newer hardware. I'm not sure if it's been mentioned in comments further down the page, but nLite is the tool I use for this sort of thing.

Of course, that's only one benefit of customizing a WinXP install CD. One of the other major things I find useful is the ability to integrate all current patches into the installer. That makes for a faster overall install, prevents many reboots, and there's no worry about being hit by unpatched vulnerabilities. The CDs I build are also nearly hands-off installers that only ask to select and/or format a hard disk prior to running. I do have an optional post-installer utility that allows selective software installs after Windows is all done, as well.

nLite is a much more powerful tool than what I've made it out to be in the examples above. If you're interested, give it a try. There's also many active forums at MSFN dedicated to making custom Windows installer images.

Anti-disclaimer: No, I'm not affiliated with nLite or MSFN in any way. I'm just a very happy user.

Same with Nlite, located here http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html/.

I believe a vista version was release as well known as vlite. I have not used either but they look very promising, I have been meaning to try out nlite for the next time I reformat but maybe I will try one of these alternatives instead. Any one out there used them all?

nlite does almost the same thing and is much more flexible and easier to use

http://www.nliteos.com/

I've been using nLite and RyanVM's update pack to do this for a while now. Great stuff, even works with my Dell OEM version of XP.

why is this news? if i remember right, windows has always had this functionality, the NT line has anyway. there are even applications that will create the preloaded ISO for you, like nLite

you CAN slipstream all updates into windows. I suggest you get up to speed where the rest of us have been for over a years now...

nlite integrates ALL patches, fixes, hotfixes, etc... into a windwos install CD. hell I can even automate the de-xpify process so I dont have to do it on every machine.

Service packs and traditional slipstreaming is very old hat as microsoft does not care anymore.

Just about everything in Windows can be removed - provided that you have the right tools - the footprint of XP can allegedly be brought down to 9MB... I have had it under 500.

I personally don't run Windows anymore, but when I did, I used nLite http://www.nliteos.com/ to remove the junk that I didn't need to create a unattended install cd. Optionally - if Windows is already installed, you can use tools such as XPLite http://www.litepc.com/ to remove the bloat.

It's more of a "we don't support this at all" and "install will fail unless it's SP2".

I'm not sure what makes the difference, but something does. You can slipstream SP2 into a SP or SP1 disk and reburn it using a program like nLite (http://www.nliteos.com/).

http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html

Here is a free (as in beer) alternative to that.
Lets you customize your windows 2k/xp install disk, and configure windows before you even install it.

1) Install a proxy server. You probably have a router of some kind. Perhaps it's a linux box. What you could use to save your bandwidth is use some of your server's HD space to download the common items (like patches from Windows Updates). Since the proxy _can_ be transparrent, there is nothing to configure on the other computers. There are many ways to do this. My suggestion: Squid. In particular, I have used the implementation in ClarkConnect. It's easy to setup, and there is a free version. If you want the pay version, it's extremely inexpensive. http://www.clarkconnect.com/

2) Use nLite. nLite is a utility that makes custom Windows install CDs/DVDs. With the program, you can make an updated CD that installs SP2, all the updates, and even drivers. It even has the option to make the install "unattended", requireing no input by you. This might not be an option since you apparently don't have the Volume License version of of XP. None the less, highly recommended for those who have to re-install often. http://www.nliteos.com/

3) Consider some way to harden the researcher's experiance. Don't want to install Linux on your search stations? Use VMWare Player and the Browser Appliance! By doing this, you effectivly remove any possiblity of Viruses, Spyware or otherwise unwanted downloads. And the best part is... if you don't like/can't use the browser appliance to do what you need... go back to windows. http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

Hope these suggestions help.

--Pathway

Well, for starters, you should be making an image installation disk for your fresh installs that incorporates (or, in MS terms - "slipstreams") what you need into it. This is especially handy if you don't have the same hardware. Check out nLite - http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html - for more details on how easy it can be to do this. This saves hours of time. Days, if you have tons of boxes to refresh.

Next you'll need a WSUS - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/updat eservices/default.mspx - box somewhere on your network which will take care of those monthly downloads for you and only do the heavy download lifting on one machine. You'll need to configure all your other boxes via group policy or registry hacks to point to this server instead of the mothership @ Microsoft so they can get the updates from there.

With these two steps, you'll free up bandwidth and have more time to hit the stacks!

Check out nLite. It's an easy interface to create slipstreamed discs.

They also offer a bunch of packages (called "Addons") you can embed into this disc, as well: Java, Firefox, AVG Antivirus, WinRAR, etc.

Every month or two I will make a new disc for installs [for customers/friends]. The unattended mode is very handy. ;-)

Check out nLite. It's an easy interface to create slipstreamed discs.

They also offer a bunch of packages (called "Addons") you can embed into this disc, as well: Java, Firefox, AVG Antivirus, WinRAR, etc.

Every month or two I will make a new disc for installs [for customers/friends]. The unattended mode is very handy. ;-)