[smallest, lightest fastest windows 7 install]

On 5/13/2015 at 3:01 AM, bphlpt said:

With today's hardware, there is not as much need or interest in "slimming" an OS as there once was, regardless of the sorry bloated state of today's OS especially Windows 8.x+.  Personally, I prefer to remove nothing, and just disable the services and whatever else I don't need, since if you find out later that you need something that you had removed, because you want to run some new software or hardware or something, adding things back is often much, much harder than it was to remove it, if it is possible at all.  Also, sometimes removals interfere with future necessary OS updates, thus requiring a complete re-install..  Many of the tools that people used to use to slim their OS, such as RT7Lite, haven't been updated in several years, even though some folks still use them, and finding support for those tools is very difficult.

 

Win Toolkit can do a good, safe job of updating your OS, and is one of the best of the current set of Windows installation / customization tools, but slimming is not it's main focus, and if you are, mistakenly IMHO, convinced you need to have a "small light version of Windows 7", you might be disappointed in the results.

 

If you are truly only going to use your machine for one predefined purpose, you might actually be better off with one of the Linux variants, since you can probably find someone that has already made a version configured for that task, though it might take a bit of looking to find it.

 

With all that said, if you still want to proceed in your Windows slimming efforts, beyond what Win Toolkit can do, you should probably check out NTLite, which is made by nuhi, the same guy who wrote nLite and vLite.  It is under active development and I have heard good things about it from others who have used it.  Just make lots of backups and be prepared to make several trial and error installs as you fine tune your system.  Whether your efforts end up being worth the time involved will have to be seen.

 

Good luck!

 

Cheers and Regards

I'd have to agree. There are really two main reasons you'd want to slim down an os insallation. One would be to fit the installation media onto something it wouldn't fit in (i.e. CD) which isn't a problem anymore really since 16GB thumb drives are so cheap and readily available. Two would be to start off with maximum performance just after installation which can really be accomplished with Win Toolkit. I basically tweaked my services a bit further from Blackviper's "tweaked" configuration. You can do the same which would be about the best you can do as far as gaining performance and speed. If you need to strip it any further than what Win Toolkit allows then you're probably going to affect stability of the OS. Back when they stripped the hell out of Windows 7 and Windows XP I think it was because hardware was still bottlenecking things a bit more. Now with the hardware spending that much time stripping an installation isn't going to gain you all that much performance.

[Create AIO Win7]

It's not really worth it in my opinion. From my experience you have to let each set of updates slipstream into each single version and THEN end up with a big image. I did this a couple years back and just made me realize it wasn't worth repeating over and over every so often with a new set of updates every month. I would say you're better off just keeping an updated set of .msu's or whatever updates and then integrate into whatever version you need at the moment.

btw, when I did do it it wasn't very hard. You just use Windows Toolkit and select ALL versions to integrate them into if I'm not mistaken (which I might be since it's been a while).

[I.can.not.open.exe.file?]

I've seen AVG antivirus cause this symptom in my Windows 10 installation. Looks like you're on Windows 7 but try and consider whether or not it's a combination of AVG and anything else you're using.