Creating a Slimmed Down WinXP Installation

Since most Dell Mini’s come with either an 8 GB or 16 GB SSD drive, storage space is a valuable commodity. A full WinXP Installation takes up on average 5 GB of storage space, so on a 8 GB SSD system that leaves you with only 3 GB for your application and files. If you visit some of the Netbook forums, you’ll often see postings regarding an “nLite” version of Windows XP, or a “slimmed down” version. What exactly is this?

There is a wonderful freeware utility called nLite that allows you to create a custom Windows XP installation where you can pick-and-choose what you want installed on your system. For example, the default WinXP installation will install various files for several different languages and keyboards, hardware drivers, applications, etc. which you probably will never use. So why not remove this unnecessary stuff from the Windows installation files? That is exactly what the nLite application does.

What’s nice about nLite, is that it have a very easy to use interface that steps you through the customization procedure. You can very easily select which items (e.g., applications, drivers, services, etc.) that you want to exclude from the custom WinXP installation files. There’s also provisions to check if you’re trying to remove a feature or file needed by something else in the installation. Now, it may seem undaunting at first since you may not know what items to keep and exclude from the custom installation, but there’s several web sites that offer assistance and suggestions.

So here’s the basic procedure:

1) Find a Windows XP Installation CD

To create your custom “slimmed down” or “nLite” version of Windows XP, you first need the WinXP installation files. These files are obtained from a WinXP installation CD, which is normally shipped with your computer system. Since I don’t have my Dell Mini as of yet, I used the WinXP SP2 installation CD that came with my Dell D610 laptop (the CD is labeled “Reinstallation CD”). Fortunately, using the Dell WinXP CD from my old laptop will also work with a Dell Mini 9, since both machines are from Dell (the installer will check information on the motherboard during installation).

So, you start by copying all the files from the Windows XP install CD to a folder on your Desktop PC. In this example, I’ll copy them to C:\tmp\XP_slim

2) Upgrading Install Files to Service Pack 3

In most cases, your WinXP install CD contains Service Pack 2 (SP2), and not the latest service pack which is SP3. Since the Dell Mini comes with WinXP SP3 installed, then you probably should upgrade your Mini to this service pack. One way, is to install the SP3 update after you complete your WinXP installation on your Dell Mini (either by downloading and installing SP3 directly, or having Windows Update take care of it). Another way, is to insert the SP3 update into the custom slimmed WinXP Installation we are building (this is called “slipstreaming”). There’s a few ways of doing this slipstream operation, which I’ll cover in a different posting.

3) Download the Dell Mini 9 WinXP Drivers

The drivers are required to control the various hardware components installed on your Dell Mini 9. You can download these drivers from the Dell.com web site, or use this special slimmed down set created by a Dell Mini user here. Whichever version you choose, extract all the driver files to a folder on your Desktop PC. In this example, I put them in C:\tmp\Slim Dell Drivers . You now have a choice of either inserting these drivers into the slimmed WinXP installation, or manually supply the drivers after you finish your Windows XP installation on your system. In this example, I’ll be inserting them into the WinXP install files using nLite.

4) Start up the utility nLite

Download the nLite utility from here, and install it on your Desktop PC. Then, run nLite and you’ll see the following screen:

After selecting your language, click “Next” to go to the next screen shown below:

Here is where you specify the folder where you copied the WinXP install files off the CD on your Desktop PC. Note, that nLite will modify these files when it finishes the “slimming” operations. Clicking the “Next” button will bring you to the next screen as shown below:

Here is where you specify what components you want to alter. Since I won’t be trying to slipstream SP3 into this installation, we can skip the “Service Pack” component. Instead, click on the components you want to change (as I’ve shown in the figure above). Then, click the “Next” button to move forward. If you elected to include “Drivers”, you should see a screen as shown below:

If you want to include the Dell Mini drivers into this WinXP installation, click the “Insert” tab at the bottom right corner of the window. You should then see a pop menu as shown below, of which you should select “Multiple Driver Folder”:

The next screen you will see is a small folder selection dialog box asking for the location of the drivers. In this example, we select the folder specified in Step (3) above:

After clicking “OK”, you should see the screen below where you select which drivers to include in this installation set. For our purposes, we select all of them.

The next screen will show the list of drivers that it will insert as shown below:

In the next screen shown below is where you actually select what components and items you want to keep or remove:

At this point, which items you elect to keep or remove is a trial-n-error procedure. For some of the components, it will be an easy choice (e.g., removing “Games” or “Outlook Express”) but some of the other components may not be as clear. Of course, you’d like to remove as much as possible, but you don’t want to remove something that will be needed by the system (otherwise, you’ll have system problems or the installation may fail).

So instead of showing all the options that I selected, I’m going to refer you to these web sites which I used for my selections. Some of them were used for creating a WinXP install for the ASUS eeePC laptop, so you’ll need to make a decision if what they are removing or keeping is applicable for the Dell Mini 9.

i64X.com – nLite Windows XP
EEEguides.com – sliming down WinXP for the ASUS eeePC

For myself, I closely followed the guide on the above i64.com web site. One thing I made sure, was to do the following:

When you nLite your XP installation MAKE SURE YOU DO NOT REMOVE “Multi Processor Support” in the “Hardware Support” tree AND “Manual install and upgrade” in the “Operating system options” tree REMOVING any of these WILL make you UNABLE to install XP Problems you might get from removing these will be Installation Bluescreens and ‘configuration errors’

Also, on the “Unattended” window under the “General” tab, select “ACPI Multiprocessor” for the computer type.

When you come to the final screen, click “Next” and nLite will process your files. When it finishes, you’ll see on the screen the final size of the WinXP installation files. Following the guide on the i64X.com site should give you a file size of around 170 MB instead of 550 MB (a substantial reduction). So the slimmed down WinXP install files will be the input folder you selected in Step (4) (in our example, that would be C:\tmp\slim_XP)

5) Creating a USB Bootable Flash Drive

Now that you have all the files configured for a slimmed down WinXP installation, we need to create a bootable USB Flash Drive so we can install the software directly to the Dell Mini (since it doesn’t come with a CD/DVD drive). If you do a Google search you’ll find several different ways of doing this, but one of the easiest is to use the Dell Diagnostic Utility. This utility should allow you to create a bootable USB Flash Drive. Alternatively, you can use the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool as well as a few other methods described on this web page.

6) Copy Slimmed WinXP Install Files to USB Drive

Now that you have your WinXP Install Files slimmed down and ready to go, simply copy all those files to the USB bootable Flash Drive you created in Step (5). Once you do that, you should be ready to go.

7) Do the WinXP Installation on your Dell Mini 9

With your bootable USB Drive in your hand, you should be ready to install your slimmed down version of WinXP. Just insert the USB Drive in a free USB port and reboot your Mini (making sure you’ve configured your Mini to boot up from the USB drive). You should see the standard Windows XP install screen and continue with the install procedure.

8 ) Troubleshooting Installation Issues

Theoretically, your final WinXP installation should be much smaller than a full XP installation. Instead of filling up 5 GB of drive space, you should have something under 1 GB. Because you removed various components from the installation files, you might run into problems during the installation phase or after. If that is the case, you’ll need to create a new nLite version of WinXP and try again, this time including components that you may have left off the first time. This is where reading over the guides on the previously mentioned web pages will come in handy, and also searching the Dell Mini forums.

Since I don’t have my Dell Mini 9 yet, I can’t test my slimmed installation. Once I do have my Mini and do the installation, I’ll make a posting with my configuration file settings so others can use it to create their own slimmed WinXP Installation.

9) Is This All Worth It?

After reading this posting, you’re probably wondering if this is all worth it. At first, I was a little nervous about using nLite, thinking it would be too complicated to figure out, however, using this utility isn’t too bad. Also, it’s much easier to do modify the installation and include custom settings than to try removing components manually after a full installation (and in some cases, you can’t remove components after the fact).

Final Note: Before re-installing your slimmed WinXP version, I suggest you make a complete backup of your existing system. The best way is to “clone” or “image” your SSD drive which is essentially making an exact copy of your current system and files. That way, if you mess up with the slim WinXP installation and want to go back to the original version you can simply re-image your SSD drive with the backup image file. If you want more info on cloning or imaging your Dell Mini 9, check out this previous posting on my blog.

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More Resources

Here’s some additional links related to using nLite for creating a slimmed down version of Windows XP for your Netbook system:

MyDellMini Forum Posting

eeePCUser Wiki

EEEguides.com

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