Software Tool Strips Windows Vista To Bare Bones

Preedit writes "A free download that can cut Windows Vista's gargantuan footprint by half or more is developing a big following on the Internet. vLite is a configuration tool that lets users automatically delete a lot of unnecessary Vista components — such as Windows Media Player and MSN installer — to pare the OS down to a reasonable size. The software is catching on. An InformationWeek story notes that a forum that asks users to suggest new features has drawn nearly 50,000 page views. Meanwhile, Microsoft officials have themselves conceded that Vista is "bloated" and are developing the next version of Windows on a core called MinWin, which is smaller than Vista by an order of magnitude."

Comments

Why Vista at all?

[webword]

Where are the Mac fanatics?

"OS X is the real answer!"

Seriously, for me, Vista was the perfect excuse to buy a MacBook Pro. After using it for about 6 months I had no choice but to go with a Mac.

Re:Vista XP is here!

[rtb61]

It is quite easy. In M$'s case it is targeted at M$ applications in order to ensure they outperform competing productions. It makes other companies applications far worse as the application has to compete for ram that has been pre-allocated for junk like internet explorer, outlook, M$ messenger, and M$ Office, which is of course why Vista was using so much ram.

That way, they could ensure that Firefox, openoffice, thunderbird etc. underperformed on vista systems.

The big question is how are people feeling about having to upgrade their operating system every two years, their file server every two years, the work station licence every two years, exchange server every two years, their exchange client every two years and finally their three resource kits and manuals every two years. That is a pretty massive cost, including retraining, installation, updating, and lost productivity as a result of being, M$'s crash test, permanent beta release, dummy.

So will this be the new M$ trick, a crap version loaded with DRM and then a reasonable version (forcing upgrades for reliability and stability), then yet another DRMed, content restricted crap version (they wont give up, that monopoly on the distribution of content, just feeds into ballmer's greed and control delusions far to much for the billy goat to ever give up on).