Optimising Windows Installs

[Flying Officer Jevans]

This came up in the Outer Marker, so here is how you do it...

Lots of the baggage that comes with Windows is complete tat for use with Flight Sim. Someone, somewhere, realised that windows was too big generally, and so created the program nLite to remove bits from the XP install. You can remove products and services you don't need, and 'stream' updates into the install, so that you don't have to install the updates.

Using this tool, you can get XP down to around 500 Mb. This could help enormously when running FS.

Just to be clear, this won't modify your existing installation, it will build an install disk so that you can do a clean install.

There is also a version for Vista, vLite, where it can be even more useful. However, it's not quite as developed yet.

Hope this helps!

http://www.vlite.net/index.html - Vista

http://www.nliteos.com/ - XP

Link back to the thread that started this:
http://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?t=180917

[xxmikexx]

Flying Officer Jevans,

Thanks for bringing the discussion over here.



FOJ, Loki, jwenting, angels355 and any other knowledgable readers, for the benefit of the readership ...

I never turn off any of the XP services because I want to run as stock a system as I'm able to. I'm not saying that others shouldn't turn them off, I'm suggesting instead that we try to get a dialog going regarding the benefits and risks of turning off various XP and Vista services.

I have no position on this subject because I have no information about it other than that Avsim's Ken Salter has been the go-to guy in the context of FS. (Maybe he no longer is.) I'm simply saying that in the absence of information I prefer to err on the side of caution.

[jdk2]

AlacrityPC is Ken Salter's latest incarnation of his very popular program FSAutostart. It runs on every Microsoft operating system released since Windows98. The program makes recommendations for most services and you can set the action to the recommendation through a user friendly GUI. Ken has spent a good deal of time on this program and is continually adding features to enhance its usefulness.