Anomalous Anomaly

<- Part II

Welcome to part three in my series on how to survive the Windows Vista transition. Last week, I provided five steps to make Windows Vista perform faster, improve application compatibility, and potentially even save your hard drive from an early death caused by disk thrashing!

This week, I’m going to explain how to make your own Windows Vista installation DVD and eliminate features you don’t want or need. Better yet, we’ll cut the disk space usage of a Windows Vista install by a pretty sizable amount. The installation size will vary based on your decisions, but you can get the install size down to less than a third of what it is out-of-box.

Before I begin, I would like to point out a video I discovered while browsing Google News. In the video, Microsoft engineer Eric Traut demonstrates MinWin, a very minimalized version of the Windows kernel. While Eric constantly reiterates that MinWin will not be used as a product itself, he does mention that Windows Server 2008 is much more minimalistic than Windows Vista is and that MinWin will become the basis of Windows 7.This is excellent news.

Although Microsoft’s server operating systems have historically been quite minimal, it shows a new direction Microsoft may be taking. What I’m hoping they’ll do is make a client version of Windows that takes this minimalistic approach. Maybe even Windows 7, the next release of Windows, could be developed with this approach in mind. It’d be a smart direction to take, because one of the primary concerns people (including myself) have brought to light about Windows Vista is that it’s quite bloated. This minimalistic client version of Windows is something that can become a reality now, but not in a retail Windows release, at least not until Windows 7.

People have said they would pay for a version of Windows XP that’s rebuilt and stripped down. But Microsoft won’t ever do that. It’s not good business to say “Here’s Windows XP… again!” It’s possible though that a future release of Windows, branded as a new version of the operating system, could take a minimalistic design path. It’d be wonderful if Microsoft made Windows even more modular than it currently is. Removal of the Add/Remove Windows Features tool is particularly disheartening. There is good news, however, because even though Microsoft won’t be releasing a minimalistic version of Windows any time soon, you can make one yourself with a little bit of effort.

There’s a great utility called vLite which allows you to take your official Windows Vista DVD, copy the contents to your hard disk, eliminate components you don’t want, tweak a few settings to enable or disable security features and so forth, and finally burn your own customized Windows Vista installation DVD. This method is surprisingly clean, and isn’t a hack. Windows Vista’s design, like Windows XP’s, is very modular. The difference is that Windows XP had a built in utility in Add/Remove Programs that allowed you to select which components you wanted to have. Vista has removed this tool, and instead only allows you to “disable” a feature, which is merely hiding it’s existence by removing shortcuts to it. Of course, merely “disabling” a feature doesn’t free any disk space.

Once you have vLite installed, you just need to have your Windows Vista DVD handy. Put it in your drive when vLite asks where the installation files are located. Point vLite to your DVD drive (typically the path is D:\), and it will prompt you to give it a second path. The second path is where it copies the installation files to as a temporary directory. Make a directory somewhere that you can find, and then point vLite to that. Once done, click Next. I’ve uploaded the vLite configuration file I used, which has an identical configuration to what I’ve recommended below.

I’ll be touching on the Components, Tweaks, and Bootable ISO sections. So for now, just check those three only and click Next.

The first section you’ll get to deal with is the Components section. A dialog pops up when you first get to this section that asks what features you want to keep. You can check any features you really want, and then click OK. Remember that the items you check in the Components section are going to be removed, not kept. There are quite a few components that I have removed in my vLite configuration:

EDIT (2/5/2008): I have updated the vLite configuration file for vLite v1.1.1. It now cleans up a lot more than it did before, but I won’t be updating the statistics for a while.

vLite Configuration Template

• Accessories
  • Snipping Tool (0.63MB)
    If you don’t have a Tablet PC, this is not useful in any way.
  • Speech Support (451.80MB)
    Dictation software. It wastes lots of space, so don’t keep it unless you really need it.
  • Windows Sidebar and Gadgets (12.64MB)
    Not a space waster, but it sure wastes RAM when running, and it doesn’t have much practical use.
• Drivers
  • I recommend removing none of the drivers because they sometimes cannot be found elsewhere. I learned this the hard way when I removed the printer drivers only to found out that Epson hasn’t provided a Windows Vista driver for my printer because they know Vista comes with one. And if you remove it here, it’s permanent. So be careful if you remove anything here.
• Games
  • Inbox Games (95.92MB)
    Solitaire, Spider Solitaire, Hearts, FreeCell, Minesweeper, and Purble Place. Not necessary components, really, and I have never used them.
  • Premium Inbox Games (82.20MB)
    Chess Titans, Inkball… More waste-of-space games.
• Hardware Support
  • I recommend removing none of the hardware support because doing so can cause some pretty weird problems. For instance, I couldn’t figure out why my modem driver kept failing to install (even though I never use my modem, I like it when all devices have drivers loaded for them). I realized long after the fact that I’d removed modem support here.
• Languages
  • Japanese (224.71MB)
    Don’t speak it? Remove it.
  • Korean (136.59MB)
    Don’t speak it? Remove it.
  • Simplified Chinese (371.56MB)
    Don’t speak it? Remove it.
  • Traditional Chinese (340.72MB)
    Don’t speak it? Remove it.
• Multimedia
  • Sample Pictures (8.81MB)
    I personally find these annoying because I feel like my system is littered with files I didn’t create.
  • Windows Media Samples (130.10MB)
    Windows has quite a few multimedia samples you won’t ever use and they waste disk space.
• Network
  • MSN Installer (5.96MB)
    Don’t get this confused with a Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger) installer, which you can get here anyway. Unless MSN is your internet service provider, you should probably trash this.
• Services
  • Offline Files (4.10MB)
    Caches network drive contents and WebDAV folders. It really wastes network bandwidth.
  • Remote Registry (0.21MB)
    The mere name of this one scares me. In case someone ever figures out how to exploit this, it’s probably best to disable it. Unless you’re in a corporate environment, you probably won’t use it anyway.
  • Volume Shadow Copy (5.60MB)
    If you remove System Restore as I suggest below, then I very strongly recommend you remove this. I’ve seen cases where having this service even in existence forces system restore points to be created which you can’t ever use and can only partially remove with the Disk Cleanup utility.
  • Windows Search (14.93MB)
    Indexes things on your computer to make searches faster. Unfortunately, if it hasn’t finished indexing, it won’t find what you’re looking for. Worse, if you don’t search often, the indexing provides no benefit.
• System
  • Beep (0.02MB)
    This is the driver that produces the very annoying high-pitched system beep when your sound drivers are not installed. I recommend removing it because I worry that speakers with software-only volume controls (like on laptops) will be damaged by it.
  • Natural Language (542.25MB)
    A speech to text engine. Basically allows you to talk to your computer and have it type for you. If you haven’t ever heard of this or used it, you probably don’t need it. It’ll save a massive amount of space if you don’t install this.
  • SuperFetch (1.33MB)
    This thing is such a disk thrasher. In the future, when we have hard disks with significantly lower latencies and higher rotational speeds, this may be useful. But right now, it’ll probably cause early drive death.
  • System Restore (2.74MB)
    As I’ve said before, this thing is a undercooked idea. It thrashes your hard disk backing everything up and wasting a massive amount of your disk space. I had thought the limit was 12%, as it was with XP by default, but it seems this limit has been removed and has consumed up to 26% of the hard drive space (i.e. 43GB of a 160GB drive). Worst of all, most of the time whenever you really need System Restore, it can’t help because the failure is so serious that the machine is in such a state that System Restore is inaccessible.
  • Tablet PC (391.54MB)
    If you don’t have a Tablet PC, you really don’t want this because it’ll just waste 391.54MB of space.
  • Windows Backup (9.43MB)
    Also rendered useless if System Restore is removed.
     
• TOTAL: 2,837.69MB (2.77GB)

When you add the sizes of each of these up, you can see that it really does save a lot of space. Well, we’re done on the components page. If you want to remove other things than the ones I’ve stated above, you can do so, but be sure to pay attention to the warnings that vLite gives you in the right pane. Click Next when you’re done.

The Tweaks section is quite useful. You can turn things like DEP and UAC on or off here. Whatever settings you choose will merely become the defaults, so they are reversible after you install Windows using this disc. You really shouldn’t stress over any of the settings you choose here. I highly recommend the following settings, but they’re up to you:

• AntiSpyware Realtime Protection
  Enabled. I haven’t seen any performance advantage by turning this off, and it’s generally a good idea to have good spyware defense software on.
• DEP (Data Execution Prevention)
  Enabled only for OS components (Optin). Windows components shouldn’t ever trigger a DEP violation message, and when they do, you may have a secondary problem. I’ve seen Windows Explorer crash repeatedly before, and I discovered that a trojan had tried using code injection techniques, and DEP detected it. Newer threats can avoid DEP’s detection, but it’s not a bad idea to have DEP on anyway.
• UAC (User Account Control)
  Disabled. As I said last week, it’s the root of most of the compatibility issues that people are experiencing in Windows Vista, and it’s a bad security model anyway.

On the left pane, you’ll note the Security, System, and Explorer items. We’re currently on Security, so click on System, and here are my recommendations for these options:

• Hibernation
  Default. It’s a useful feature, but if you have a lot of RAM, you may want to turn this off. Since Hibernation will basically copy the entire contents of RAM to your hard disk when you use Hibernation, it can consume a sizable amount of disk space.
• Memory requirement
  Default. If your system is so low on RAM that you need to change this, then I would suggest getting a new machine.
• Paging Executive
  Disabled (only if you have 1GB of RAM or more). As I mentioned last week, the Windows Executive can be paged to disk which makes certain operations costly. If you disable paging it, it forces it to stay in system RAM which greatly increases responsiveness.
• Power scheme
  Balanced. You can use whatever you want, but I use Balanced.

Now go to the Explorer page, by clicking Explorer in the right pane.

• Show extensions for known file types
  Yes. I highly recommend enabling this, because it’s becoming commonplace that malicious software designers will name their trojans things like readme.txt.exe. If this option’s set to ‘no’, you will merely see ‘readme.txt’ and you might think it’s a text file and then when you open it, you’ve unintentionally deployed their trojan.
• Show hidden files and folders
  No. You can enable this if you want, but it will also show things that you shouldn’t touch, like the desktop.ini files which give folders in your home directory their custom icons. So you could accidentally delete them and not be able to get them back.
• Show protected operating system files
  No. Same reason as above.

Good news. We’re almost done! Just click Apply now. vLite will ask whether you want to “Just apply the changes” or “Apply and rebuild”. I very highly recommend going with the latter option because it will actually remove the components instead of just save a configuration file for Windows Setup on the disk.

Once the process finishes, click Next, and you will be taken to the ISO section. This is where you’re given the option to create an image, burn directly to a disc, erase a rewritable disc, or write an image to disc. I recommend a direct burn unless you know what to do with an .ISO file.

Congratulations! You’ve completed the Windows Vista vLite process. You’ve now got a lean and fast Windows Vista operating system install disc.

For those interested, I gathered some post-install statistics for comparison between a non-vLite Windows Vista install and the vLite configuration used for this article:

The biggest performance and reliability gains here can’t really be measured. It’s not possible to say disk thrashing is at X% of what it was or the number of crashes/incompatibilities has been reduced by X%. However, I can say from personal experience that you’ll be satisfied in the long-term with the performance and reliability of the vLite’d Windows Vista install. I have been using this same configuration for two weeks now and have had no troubles with disk thrashing or incompatibilities.

The configuration I specified wasn’t the most stripped version of Windows Vista that we can get with vLite, it’s just a recommended starting point. I have opted to not remove certain components to retain functionality. You can indeed strip several of the Vista components I didn’t mention here and save quite a bit more, but beware that stripping certain components can severely hamper functionality.

As before, I would appreciate any feedback you can offer. Email me directly at steven@uplinklabs.net and let me know what’s on your mind!

<- Part II