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I think nLite will do what you're after.

You can't exactly "uninstall" the browser, but you can remove it from the installation media, thereby preventing it's installation. But, you knew that, right?

http://www.nliteos.com/

It's been years since I used this, but it worked great back then!

Not necessarily. Basically, a guy can build his own version of Windows, and leave out all the cruft, such as Explorer. We don't really need a shell to do installations. Hey, I've got it! Let's reconstitute DosShell!!

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

Updates sure were a bitch, though. Downloading SP1, 2 and 3 took ages even on my 10 meg connection

Too bad no one introduced you to Nlite. You could have created a custom install disc with the service packs already in, as well as drivers and other goodies.

http://www.nliteos.com/

Even if you have a recovery CD, it is so worth building your own install media. The key bit is you need to find your setupp.ini file. Find it, gmail yourself a copy. With that info you can turn a retail CD into an OEM CD.

(Info on setupp.ini)
http://www.thetechguide.com/howto/setuppini.html

The next bit is creating an OEM ISO. Use any WinXP CD you can find - MSDN, etc - and use NLite to create a custom image. Great opportunity to slipstream in the service packs, patches, and any tuning you want as well. Replace the old setupp.ini with yours, and burn the ISO. Use the license key that came with your machine.

http://www.nliteos.com/

As a bonus, this makes for a nice clean OS. None of the aftermarket junk the manufactures add in.

http://www.nliteos.com/

Even if you have a recovery CD, it is so worth building your own install media. The key bit is you need to find your setupp.ini file. Find it, gmail yourself a copy. With that info you can turn a retail CD into an OEM CD.

(Info on setupp.ini)
http://www.thetechguide.com/howto/setuppini.html

The next bit is creating an OEM ISO. Use any WinXP CD you can find - MSDN, etc - and use NLite to create a custom image. Great opportunity to slipstream in the service packs, patches, and any tuning you want as well. Replace the old setupp.ini with yours, and burn the ISO. Use the license key that came with your machine.

http://www.nliteos.com/

As a bonus, this makes for a nice clean OS. None of the aftermarket junk the manufactures add in.

http://www.nliteos.com/

I never had an experience with that particular config but if you blue screened I'd blame HP's drivers...for their portables they are pretty crummy. I think HP seriously spends 10% of their time getting the low level (critical) features working and the other 90% implementing things like detecting when you're low on ink or disconnected from the internet.

For example the HP media keys driver can bork any other keyboards connected to the system. If it fails for whatever reason, you have to boot into safe mode to type in your password. I've never seen any other media key driver () that can bork the system keyboard driver completely. Most other media key drivers use a service or user mode application...I suspect that HP is using a filter driver which doesn't cascade the information down to the lower drivers properly.

I've also seen them release ATI display drivers which are completely custom built and don't match (or work with) the components of the regular ATI release drivers...and it's not for optimization. The ATI release drivers work better in every way, and the HP ones will often have random hardware acclerated features disabled in their drivers for no apparent reason (maybe the video peformance is too good?).

Their uninstallers often lock up or crash the system entirely outside of safe mode too, which shows how stable their driver packages are, and how well they're tested. The list of bad drivers and software included with the Pavillion is huge. Any service pack upgrade with their stuff installed is a serious game of chance. A clean install of SP3 would probably work. Just make sure you preserve your OEM activation if your model uses it. Also make sure your SATA controller's text mode drivers are included in your Windows XP install disk because you can only install them from a floppy in text mode setup. You can slipstream them with nLite if they aren't included.

The best way to do that would to slipstream your drivers into your install disk.

I've used nlite to slip in my nvidia raid drivers. You can use it for more than just raid so that you have a damn near up to date computer straight out of install.

http://www.nliteos.com/

You can also use it on older windows OS's, I used it on my win2k disk so that if I install it again I don't need to use floppies to start it off.

No, he meant adding the SATA drivers to you WinXP installation, where you don't need to insert a disk to install your SATA drives. Check out http://www.nliteos.com/

nLite: http://www.nliteos.com/

I'll grant #3 but there's no reason not to slipstream SP3 into WinXP if you simply must install it.

Animation can add another level of context to the user interface. For instance, status messages with fading background colors (made popular by 37Signals with their Yellow-Fade Technique)--that's animation, but it's used subtly, sparingly and appropriately, so it gets a pass.

The places where it is simply unforgivable to use animation is in scroll effects, form fields or menu items. I always end up using nLite when I reinstall an operating system because it lets you create new installs that have all that CRAP turned off. It's astonishing how much snappier your computer feels.

Why use an illegal spyware ridden torrent copy ?

Just use nLite for customizing an XP install, or vLite for a custom vista* install. Both tools do a very good job of creating lightweight Windows installations.

(*although WHY anyone would still be running vista, is beyond me.)

-Jar

I can remove Linux bloat.

As you can with Windows. And it's quite a bit easier, even if with Windows it's more like going from being a 600 lb man to a 250 lb man (still a bit chunky), while with Linux you would be going from a 200 lb man (not really fat at all) to a rail-thin, barely-alive 98 lb weakling.

Like Blaster was the only worm that Windows has seen in the past 5 years. How about Conficker? That affected SP2 machines.

If you were reading, several posts up I said that the firewall being enabled by default was why it didn't pose much of a threat on the internet as a whole, but moreso on LANs where other LAN machines are trusted machines.

And how many people are going to know how to slipstream a windows install? I know IT people who have no clue how to do it.

I can't help it if your IT people are retarded. Slipstreaming is incredibly easy. http://www.nliteos.com/ But I still know IT guys that deploy FAT32 XP images onto new machines with 500GB hard drives.

This includes IE, Chrome, and Safari on Windows. What's worse, because of the OCSP attack [CC] that Moxie also presented at Defcon, this certificate cannot be revoked."

It irks me how much Microsoft and Google products depend on Windows components.

I'm an avid nLiter for my own personal computers. Google uses BITS for updates, and apparently MS Crypto too. This is all stuff that I strip out entirely, because just about all non-Microsoft non-Google software works fine without it.

If there's one thing I've learned about software development, it's that if you depend on system APIs, you're more likely to get attacked. After all, every Windows computer has such libraries, so why wouldn't hackers target it? Short of heavily modified/nLited XP computers, you'd have a 100% attack base if you can find an exploit in the component, or a way to exploit that component's behaviour.

As a developer, if you have an option about what you use to handle something... like crypto or updates... code it yourself and code it properly, or go for a third party library. (perhaps open source) XML Parsing? Code it yourself or use a third party lib, but DO NOT use MS XML parsing. You're asking for trouble if you do!

To me plug and play is equivalent to hotplug, but for hardware that doesn't warrant "hot".

Ex: Ubuntu doesn't have Plug'n'Play USB sticks, because you have to unmount them when unplugging, similar to Win2k. In Win2k, none of your changes are written unless you eject first. For Ubuntu, if you delete anything off your USB stick, you can completely corrupt it unless you unmount first. :P Same story for OSX - screwed up an SD card pretty bad by pulling it out of a card reader.

XP, on the other hand, has flawless plug'n'play for USB sticks and SD cards. Once the blinking LED goes out, you can pull it out and you're good to go.

Now, regarding drivers... I really don't care. Windows and Linux use different kernel models - Linux builds tons of drivers into the Kernel, which makes it take forever to boot, and Windows doesn't. Windows has tons on the install DVD, but is fetching drivers really so difficult? I usually use nLite on XP to remove all the drivers I don't need, and then I just download them if I finally need to install something. It seems to speed the OS up a bit.

Way to miss the point.

Please clarify the point, then.

Anyway, windows 7 = "almost" as fast as XP

In UI responsiveness, perhaps - assuming adequate specs to run both operating systems. I have a feeling Win7 will be horribly slow if you actually got it to run on a P3 with 256MB of RAM.

XP = not fast enough for netbooks and definitely not the OLPC

OLPC 1.5 has a 1.0ghz C7-M, I thought? That's quite a bit beefier than the laptops XP originally shipped on. And if I read the specs correctly, 1GB of RAM too?

XP is faster than Ubuntu, and people try to run that on their netbooks. Seems to me both are decently suited to the task. You could also strip XP down with a tool like nLite. I did that for a relative that had an old Thinkpad 390e, which turned it into a speed demon. Booted in about 30-35 seconds, started Firefox 2 in about 12, and OpenOffice 2.x in ~15. Warm starts were only a second or two. Hibernation only took ~20 seconds from power-on to desktop.

To compare, I have Ubuntu installed on a 1.2ghz Via Eden computer, and it's nowhere near that fast. Booting takes a long time, and OpenOffice takes forever to start up. Firefox is faster, at just 8 seconds, but Firefox is also newer, so that's not a fully valid comparison. Memory usage at boot is 3x higher, at just over 130MB.

However, I'm not a linux guru, and I haven't finished tweaking Ubuntu yet. To give it a fair shake, I need to be able to claim equal expertise at Ubuntu modding as I have with XP modding.

Also have to consider the real cost of windows is, MS ULTRA CHEAP OMG WINDOWZ LIZENZES are actually meant to be paid for real later...

Windows isn't suitable for the OLPC. Microsoft has very corporate motivations rather than charitable ones. The main reason it isn't suitable isn't cost, but rather how quickly they drop support.

Microsoft is unwilling to customize XP for such a device, because they'd have to support it - and yet they want XP on it, because it's great marketing.

As far as I'm concerned the OLPC project should stay the hell away from Microsoft - but XP still makes a fine choice for netbooks, especially for someone willing to dig in and mod it a bit. :)

If you are going to fart around that much, you might as well build a new install CD with SP3 slipstreamed in and the most recent hotfixes set to run on install:

http://www.nliteos.com/guide/part1.html

I have built such a CD from the I386 folder on my harddrive (my laptop came with a recovery partition, not a CD) and successfully installed it into a virtual machine.

You should look into nLite. It might help you out - there's a setting there that can terminate anything that refuses to shut down within 5-10 seconds.

nLite lets you customize your WinXP ISO.

It's fairly easy to create a slipstreamed install disc.

Fairly easy, if you know what you're doing to begin with. If you don't, I suggest you use nLite; it'll slipstream it for you, and a whole lot more, too boot. Things like integrating drivers (including RAID and SCSI drivers, so no more floppies), removing components, and setting up unattended install answer files.

"I'm facepalming hard."

Could be you are doing it wrong? Lose the palm, try the edge of the table. If you regain consciousness, you might want to explore nlite: http://www.box.net/shared/c1d4bd0az5#1:10768665:108618379 http://www.nliteos.com/guide/ Shared DLL's remain, of course. The DLL's are called "shared" for a reason. But, IE can be removed, not just disabled.

That said, I'd love to figure out how to slipstream IE8 and WGA and so on, as the process I mentioned above *does* leave a few things out.

You could include the updates manually in the $OEM$ distribution folder. Of course this isn't true slipstreaming as the updates will be installed afterwards.

Tools such as RyanVM's Integrator and nLite also can provide an easier, automated way to slipstream updates and customize Windows installs. nLite also supports addons that people can create for things like WGA and IE8.

A good source of information and downloads for custom Windows installs is the MSFN forums,Unattended Windows install guide, and WinCert.net forums.

Try nLite. Master your XP cd, plug it in and walk away.

http://www.nliteos.com/

You say that like it's a bad thing. If you know what you're doing, there's loads of useless crap in the Windows directory.

This is modded funny, but it's no joke. The windows directory has a ton of stuff which hardly anybody ever uses. Nlite can help a lot with this issue — basically, it lets you customize your windows installation CD, remove all of the components which you don't need, and while you're at it, slipstream the latest service pack, updates, and any settings you want preconfigured. Pretty nifty.

nLite is your friend. Slipstream drivers, service packs, hotfixes, plus configure/disable many of XP's annoying defaults

http://www.nliteos.com/

Yes, you can slipstream them into the CD but so far that has proved to be too much of a hassle.(secretly awaits any tips on easy slipstreaming)

Er, nLite ?

This is something I have instantly turned off in every version of Windows so far. Thank god for nLite - you can create your install disk with all this bs turned off to start with!

I think I'd recommend Nlite, although there are other means of accomplishing this task. It does appear to run in Wine.

Or slipstream your drivers in with nLite
Find out what your sata controller is (probably intel), get the drivers, integrate them into your install CD, and you got a working XP cd.

Since I reinstall XP every 4-5 months on my laptop, built myself a installer CD with all the drivers and some essential programs (pretty much an image, but disguised as the windows installer). Put in CD, press return, fast format drive, press install and walk away. Come back 15 minutes later to find a fully working fresh install of XP waiting for you.

Actually I would avoid Win95. It was just too buggy. I am guessing you put it on an older laptop, yes? I would recommend either Win2K or one of the light Puppy Linux builds. For compatibility you can run Win2K through Nlite and as you can see from the FAQ you can get it down to 60MB for the .iso. I have used it on many an older machine and can testify that with Nlite you can have Win2K running well in 64Mb of RAM and have it be a screaming demon in anything 128Mb or better.

With an Nlited Win2K and Kmeleon CCF ME you can have a VERY fast and stable experience on as little as a 233MHz with 64Mb of RAM. Great for older laptops. Give it a try and I'll bet you'll like it. But if you want to run Win9x, run Win98SE. Win95 was never a stable OS.

It really shouldn't be atrocious.

If you strip out the IE rendering engine from Windows (using a tool like nLite) then memory usage drops about 20-30MB. If you go to an explorer window without stripping it out, HTML content can pop up instant. With it stripped out, you get nothing.

IE shouldn't be taking any time to start. The rendering engine is already in memory. It just has to load the UI, and a few plugins.

Regardless of that... these benchmarks seem quite tailored. I'm curious which renders slashdot the fastest.

The important thing with Linux is, that you can choose how much you system takes to boot up.

You can do the same thing with XP or Vista. The difference is that you need to do it with a third party tool, but nonetheless, paring down your OS is a power user task, and power users are the kind of folks who download said tools.

My preferred copy of XP right now is one I stripped down with nLite. Boots in 13 seconds on a 1 GHz P3 machine. I need to rebuild it with new patches, though.

Yes, but I refuse to deal with anymore screensavers involving oily naked guy butts after having to clean the fat girl's PC down the street ;-)

But seriously with XP Iso Builder or Nlite why would you NOT just roll your own Windows install? With XP ISO Builder it is so simple I let my 15 year old nephew roll his own so he could have the practice and learn about things like services. It is pretty damned simple and straight forward with an easy to use tool like that. It isn't like the old days when you had to learn all the Windows CMD for slipstreaming to update and customize the OS.

Just use autopatcher to get all the patches(also great to get all the Office patches and have them all burned to DVD), use XP Iso Builder to integrate them, or NLite if you want to strip anything out of the OS beyond language packs, and hit burn. Pretty simple. And then when you need a reinstall or get a new PC it is a simple matter to build a custom install for the hardware. You can even add all the drivers for your hardware so it is ready to go on first boot.

I have a 733MHz with 384MB of PC100 and XP runs great. Are you actually trying to run the default install? Because the default install of ANY MSFT OS is crap. Go get a copy of NLite or XP ISO Builder and make you a nice unattended with all the crap services turned off and see the difference.

If you don't know which services to kill here is a nice easy to follow list. But with 192MB you might be better running Win2K as I've found the lowest "sweet spot" for XP is 256MB, whereas Win2K plays nice with 128MB. But please don't torture yourself with WinME. Is your self esteem low or something that you would want to flog yourself with that evil OS? I'm sure that whatever you've done in the past surely isn't worth THAT level of punishment. Just forgive yourself and move on.

Nlite.

nLite & vLite my friend. Not only can you remain legal, but you get a much better set of options that with your pirated CD. It can even do hands free installs so that next time someone has a problem, then can just re-do the whole thing themselves.....

Well, of course. If they didn't occasionally remind you of their existence, you might start to think you don't need them.

I haven't used a TSR virus scanner for years.

Through adequate user precautions, they're completely unnecessary.

With just a few simple precautions, even in Windows, you shouldn't need one either:

• Use Firefox exclusively - updating it when necessary.
• Use Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express
• Use only your own bookmarks to visit your bank's website and other popular sites.
• Run all remotely suspicious executables as a privilege starved user (such as one having no permissions other than read access to a single folder containing the suspect executable)
• Put your computer behind a physical firewall such as a router.
• Install using a slipstreamed Service Pack 2 or later install disc)
• Run an occasional free full system scan when convenient, note that you don't have to maintain updates or any similar stupidity since it's an online scan.

The only threats likely to get past these types of precautions - such as new malware only hours or days old - are unlikely to be stopped by a virus scanner that doesn't know what to look for either. So what have you got to gain by ditching TSR scanners? More system resources, possibly more money.

From my exp as a PC repairman it sounds like you got hit from one of the many pop up BHO bugs out there. Either that or a lovely piece of malware like a clickjacker. You didn't go to a porn site in IE or install any toolbars in IE,did you? Anyway here is what you do. First go do an online bug scan. I would suggest housecall. I would personally bet on a a BHO bug from what little you've posted. If Housecall doesn't find it you can use Dependency Walker to help track it down by looking for anything being called by IE that isn't in either the Windows or Internet Explorer folders. Simply unzip Dependency Walker and choose File/Open and navigate to IE which is in /Program Files/Internet Explorer and click on IEXPLORER.EXE. This will give you a full list of dependencies and their paths. You can also run Hijack This and post what it outputs to their forum and they can help track down the source if it is a clickjacker or BHO.

Anyway if you do decide to go the reinstall route I would suggest NLite which will allow you to strip a lot of the bloat from the OS BEFORE reinstall, including IE IIRC. Just remember to leave the MSHTML.DLL files because there are several programs that use these for help files. I hope this helps, because I usually view having to reinstall a customer's OS as a last resort. Usually with a little time and patience the bug can be tracked down and killed.

N-lite is your friend!!! http://www.nliteos.com/

You might want to check out nLite, which makes it easy to customise XP installations. You can remove the bloat, slipstream drivers and patches, run fully unattended installs etc. AFAIK under the hood it uses the tools Microsoft provide for corporate sysadmins and the like, but with a more user-friendly interface and useful defaults. Very popular with the Windows-loving section of the Netbook community and great for VM installs.

It works with 99.999% of everything, and doesn't suck hard like Beasta

I'd love a copy of XP that installed as easily as hitting the "install" button.

nLite

You can slipstream in service packs and hotfixes, set all those little options you always change, chose not to install certain components (even Luna), set your CD-key...

That's where driverpacks and perhaps nlite projects come in handy.

I actually set it up (XP on XP) to test streamed unattended XP installs Nlite, and at that stage I wasn't too worried about 3D support or USB as I knew that any hardware issues were virtual in any case.
What bugged me was trying to set up a virtual shared folder and getting the guest additions to work (providing seamless mouse transitions).
Eventually one obscure forum thread suggested installing it twice which fixed the problem.
Interesting to read here that it may not support USB and 3D, so the next time I play with it I'll give it a go as 1.6.2 seems to have USB support.
I've been blindly recommending Virtualbox as an alternative to dual booting XP over Vista - so I need to check the hardware compatibilities.
Also, I think that the systems I'm likely to use it on may have problems with the ACPI Linux bug.
Recently I was testing Acronis recovery manager boot disk which is Linux based, and failed miserably on a Gigabyte board.
So I wonder if Virtualbox can also reflect bios issues on boards which may be incompatible with certain OSs?

> Anyone who says Windows is easy to install has either used pre-made image CDs, has only done upgrades, or has never actually installed it.

It's called nLite. Windows *is* easy to install....

A Windows install without all the needless bells and whistles runs nicely. Who'd have thunk it. Well, many consumers thunk it, but Microsoft's marketing demagogues didn't.

Not to mention a few developers.

Okay, so let me get this straight. Windows XP is supposedly going to be cancelled ASAP, but Windows 10,000 BC Edition still being licensed until November?! I believe this makes approximately zero sense.

Why? Because for contemporary computers, Windows XP is, believe it or not, a decent operating system PROVIDED THAT you use nLite to customize your Windows XP installation CD-ROM to install the darn thing with all options changed to the opposite of the Microsoft-provided defaults, AND install CCleaner to run automatically on startup with all options selected, AND install Firefox and set it as the default browser, AND replace Notepad with your favorite text editor AND run it behind a Linux- or *BSD-based firewall... Provided you do all these things and probably a few more, all of which will take approximately an hour and a half to setup from first boot to completion if you use nLite, you'll get a pretty decent operating system. Windows 10,000 BC Edition won't really do much for you nowadays. Why is support for it lasting longer than for XP, which should supercede Vista?!

There's always nlite....