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."

Software Tool Strips Windows Vista To Bare Bones..

.. and then pushes it into a freezing lake?

vLite will not turn Vista into a usable OS...

... unless and until it removes the draconian, RIAA- and MPAA-friendly DRM from the OS, and returns control of the PC back to the user who bought it.

Re:vLite will not turn Vista into a usable OS...

I think people are upset because it will preempt you from doing these things with next-generation media. DVDs are technically protected, but only the hardware enforces this. People are upset because MS moved some of the support into software, and at such a level that it actually slows things down a bit and makes the OS more complicated even for people who do nothing at all with video.

Add free version

A free software tool that promises to strip down the Windows Vista operating system -- which even some Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) officials have called "bloated" -- to a minimalist state is attracting big interest on the Internet.

vLite, created by developer Dino Nuhagic, automatically removes a number of non-essential Windows Vista components in order to pare the OS's heavy footprint by half or more.

vLite allows users to preselect numerous Vista features for automatic removal prior to installing the OS on their personal computers. Among them: Windows Media Player, Windows Photo Viewer, MSN Installer, Wallpapers, SlideShow, Windows Mail and other utilities.

"It's not just about hard disk space. There is also an increase in OS responsiveness and you don't have to tolerate all kinds of things you don't use," said Nuhagic, in an e-mail to InformationWeek explaining why he launched the project.

vLite, however, isn't for the technically timid. The software warns that the changes it imposes on Vista are "permanent, so be sure in your choice."

Nuhagic said he doesn't know exactly how many downloads vLite has seen -- but a forum that asks users to submit suggestions for the next version has drawn almost 50,000 views.

The emergence of tools like vLite reflect the frustrations voiced by many computer users over Vista's bulk and resource requirements.

Loaded with an abundance of features and tools designed to ease navigation and bolster security, the Home Premium and Ultimate editions of Vista both require a whopping 15 GBs of available disk space for installation. By contrast, Windows XP -- Vista's predecessor -- requires 1.5 GB of available space for installation of the Professional version.

With Vista bearing a footprint 10 times larger than XP's, even Microsoft officials are expressing concerns about Windows' growing waistline. Speaking last year at the University of Illinois, Microsoft distinguished engineer Eric Traut said the operating system had become bloated.

"A lot of people think of Windows as this large, bloated operating system. That may be a fair characterization," said Traut.

In response to such concerns, Traut said Microsoft has adopted a new, modular approach to OS development that will yield more streamlined products beginning with Windows 7 -- a successor to Windows Vista that's expected to be available some time in 2010.

The approach calls for Windows developers to use a bare bones version of the OS -- dubbed MinWin -- as the building block for their next programming effort. MinWin is built on about 25 MBs of data -- making it smaller than Windows Vista by an order of magnitude.

Until it's ready, there's always programs like vLite.

Not The Operating System

I don't think it's fair to call Vista a bloated operating system. You look at the list of crud that this tool removes; that's not Operating System, that's application crud that should be optional in the install anyway.

Just because MS wants it to be part of the compulsory install (all the better to monopolise your computer and online profile) doesn't make it part of the operating system. I mean, come on, what makes MSN Installer part of an OS?

Very good news for VMWare and gamers

nLite let you tune the core OS install - exposing uninstall options the 'default' installer, letting you fold in service packs and patches, drivers, pre-sorting license keys, users, and custom settings. When you get done, you can do a clean slate install and end up with something that won't take another four hours of tweaking to get where you wish was a starting point directly from the ISO.

I started using nLite to build an XP distro that would run on a CF card. Running minimal services, I noticed how much faster it was too -- became the install for my gaming rig. Space was also a concern when building VMWare images, so starting with a mean clean install was a godsend. Granted, it took a couple tries - it is very easy to kill off a critical bit when you do this sort of chainsaw sculpture to the OS. Once you get it right, it is a fantastic (free!) tool. It is wonderful to see the same technology available to Vista.

We'll see MinWin in 2010... not

Yeah, right. A big company's approach to all difficult problems is to imagine a solution for them and create a name for that solution. Problem? Vista is bloated. Solution: create the name "MinWin."

If Microsoft wanted to reduce Vista's bloat, they'd just reduce it.

They might, if they had any good faith about it, analyze and SQA vLite and license it or offer and approved version. Or structure the present Vista so that it installs a reasonable core and allows you to "opt in" to the extra stuff.

What's likely happening is a turf battle between all the managers that want their bloat in the product, are threatened by any suggestions that it be trimmed, and will fight it's being trimmed to the death--or at least for a couple of years when they move on to their next assignment.

If MinWin happens at all, what will happen is that they'll trim Vista by 20% and then pack on 100% of new bloat.

Now microsoft can prove it

Microsoft alway said Vista wasn't fat, it was just big-boned. Now they can prove it!

Benchmarks

What I'd be interested in seeing is benchmarks for desktop and 3d performance. It's all very well saying "ooooh look at how much shit it removes!" if it has no actual impact on performance. Most of the things it appears this thing removes will have barely any impact on hard disc space, cpu cycles or memory usage - MSN Installer for instance; removing that will free up a couple of megabytes of hard-disc space at best.

Anyone got any useful benchmarks?

WARNING: Use with care!!!

I tried it, and it did such a thorough job of stripping down my system that my wallpaper of Pamela Anderson was replaced with a skeleton.

Re:Vista XP is here!

It's much faster than XP, uses your memory and other resources far more intelligently, and the performance benefits of DX10 over DX9 (even with some DX10 trickery involved) are things you simply can't find in any other OS out there, open source or otherwise. That's just an FYI.

Re:Vista XP is here!

That's funny, I used it on my uncle's 2.2Ghz Core 2 Duo (0.2 Ghz faster than my laptop, and they both have 2GB of RAM), and it was a pig compared to XP. Taking up 15GB of HD space and half my video memory for a fancy 3D interface what is essentially a file and program manager isn't what I call intelligent use of resources either.. even Microsoft seem to have noticed that, if you actually read the article..

Re:Vista XP is here!

Just to help keep your viewpoint balanced... there's negative features in Vista as well (especially the 64-bit version).

Here's the ones that I've run into as being major issues in my 4-5 months with Vista. There's others, but I either haven't personally run into them, or they're not particularly painful.

1) Vista removed support for horizontal or vertical span modes with a multi-monitor setup. (well, more of they changed things up so that it's impossible for drivers supporting that to be written) If you're not aware of these modes, horizontal span mode for example allowed your software to treat your collection of displays as one really wide display... so a full-screen racing or flight sim would span all your displays not just one. XP supported this. Vista doesn't. Meaning that if I want to have a decent racing sim setup I've got to go back to XP. This is an issue with both 32 and 64 bit versions. There's a lot of speculation that it's related to the integrated DRM stuff Vista includes.

2) The 64-bit version of Vista removes backwards compatability for 16-bit applications. I dunno about you, but sometimes I get nostalgic for the games I grew up with... and some of those games are good enough that horrible dated graphics don't matter.

3) The 64-bit version of Vista requires you to specify EVERY TIME YOU BOOT that you want to use unsigned drivers. (You used to be able to specify in the mbr to always use them, but MS released at least 2 critical updates that disabled that) Perhaps this isn't an issue for the average Joe, but there's a decent number of aps out there that I use that utilize an unsigned driver. Then there's beta releases of video card drivers and the like.

Long story short, I'm currently awaiting a new harddrive that's going to be a XP drive so that I can continue to use the functionality I should have. Vista may have improvements, but to me it's offset by the functionality they removed.

As to why I'm not moving back to XP entirely? 64-bit Vista is actually a usable 64-bit OS. (64-bit XP never was really supported by hardware manufacturers) And there's DX10 which will, sometime, maybe, be a reason.

Re:Vista XP is here!

As someone who has tried Vista on 3 different systems (64-bit desktop, 32-bit desktop, and 32-bit laptop), I can honestly say the complaints about it are not FUD. It was completely unusable on the laptop and noticeably slower than XP on both desktops.

I may try it again when SP1 comes out. As for the DX10 features, they can be given to XP and Linux users via OpenGL, which always gets new graphics card features before DirectX. Back when hardware T&L was introduced, it was available on OpenGL as soon as the video cards shipped, but it required a new major version of DirectX. The same is true with features like geometry/streaming shaders. It will be years before any game developer using DX can drop support for DX9. As a game developer myself, this problem will ensure that I continue using OpenGL for a long time.

Re:Vista XP is here!

The GUI is definitely part of the GUI

Truer words have never been spoken!

Re:Vista XP is here!

It's much faster than XP...

Wha wha what? Maybe on paper but not in the real world. I have a 2 processor 3ghz Xeon machine with 2 gb of ram. Not made for Vista admittedly but still a fairly decent machine. With a clean install of Vista it takes me around 5-10 seconds to delete a file. To delete a simple file sitting on my desktop. Again, I live in the real world things may be different in the Marketing world.

Re:Vista XP is here!

Something is wrong then because I have a low-end Sempron notebook with 1.5gb RAM, vista home and deletion is almost instantaneous...

Vista isn't perfect, but it's better than most of the (uninformed or lacking in experience) critics give it credit for.

Re:vista ultra-lite - rm /dev/sda1/*

3 years running AVG: $0
3 years running Ad-aware, Spybot, and CCleaner: $0

Now, I don't run Vista either, but saying it's cheaper to buy an iMac is a little disingenuous.

Re:The next step...

This tool works by modifying the original install disk and you make your own more compact version of the installer. It does not work by modifying your currently installed OS.

Re:Thanks, but

But what if there are some things you want to load (say, DirectX 10) which you can't load in Gentoo? Are you supposed to rejoice in the fact you got to choose which components you wanted in your functionality-lacking OS install? Being able to customise an OS install is not as important as being able to use that OS to perform tasks you want. I can't use Gentoo because it doesn't run the applications I need (Adobe, Office, games). Not that I'm knocking Gentoo, I just don't see how your argument is anything but fanboyish nose-cutting/face-spiting posturing, desperately trying to ilicit "hear hear"s from the rest of the slashdot crowd.

That is a Convenience Some Cannot Afford

I'll stick with Gentoo. Load what I use, don't load what I don't.

This is sage advice for you and I. However, we constitute maybe 0.05% of the populace (I do not mean to be elitist). You may find me on the other side soon in the unwashed 99.95% of the populace as I once enjoyed spending a whole Saturday installing a new Linux distro or "emerging" and acquiring a few new packages I didn't have.

I do not have this kind of time anymore. The other day I received an e-mail from a friend. He wanted to know how he could get the absolute most out of his hardware for a very specific game he plays (World of Warcraft). I began with recommending plain old Linux and then installing wine and trying to run it. But I soon realized how hopeless this would be as I think he has a nice ATI card that once was top of the line five months ago.

So I told him to get a fresh XP install and not install anything else on it. Perhaps this MinWin or core of a Windows will satisfy him? Perhaps it will also satisfy me in finding simplicity in an operating system that can run my games and programs that are only for win32?

Re:Slashdot = Clicks

And the 50000 page views are hard-coded on the article! That's soooo web 1.0...

Re:Comparing MinWin and Vista doesn't hold up

MinWin is a non-graphical kernel that doesn't do much more than boot up and host a webserver. It's not exactly a full functional operating system, so yes it's going to be considerably smaller.

Point is that by getting the cruft out of the kernel customization will be easier and the result probably still overall smaller.

Amazing ideas these MS boys have these days. Imagine an operating system with a small, even micro, kernel. To this the user can add the operating system toys that he needs around that kernel, resulting in a lean, mean operating system that does what he needs and nothing more.

I hear some crazy Finnish guy had a similar idea once but nobody listened to him.

Re:Comparing MinWin and Vista doesn't hold up

Ooooo, the pendants are going to get you for implying that Linux uses a "micro" kernel.

That depends if they [gnu.org] Hurd [wikipedia.org] him.

Even if they did, it might not Mach [wikipedia.org] any difference.

Re:nLite

nLite is definitely worth mentioning. I took a Windows XP Professional CD (580MB or so) and stripped out all the drivers that I never use, apps I never use, and functionality I never use, and it took it down to about 150MB. I also added in Service Pack 3, Firefox, Acrobat Reader, and drivers for my hardware, then customized it with registry tweaks beforehand (e.g. turning off the 'Welcome to Windows' page, disabling 'hide inactive notification icons', and so on), set it up to join a domain, added a new Windows theme (Royale, from MCE), and then set it up with an automated install with our company's volume key.

The end result? A tedious two-hour install procedure ('Oh, is it asking you something? Ok, just click 'Next'... greyed out? Click on the... yeah, there you go...') turned into a TEN MINUTE INSTALL. The only thing I haven't managed to do yet is to set up a USB drive as a bootable volume, to install from a flash drive to speed installation even further.

Definitely check it out if you have to do XP installs more than once a year.