Friday, February 4, 2011

Windows Vista Virtual PC-image for Visual Studio-development minimized

Which features and services in Vista can you remove with nLite (or tool of choice) to make a Virtual PC-image of Vista as small as possible?

The VPC must work with development in Visual Studio.

A normal install of Vista today is like 12-14 GB, which is silly when I got it to work with Visual Studio at 4 GB. But with Visual Studio it totals around 8 GB which is a bit heavy to move around in multiple copies.

  • I would probably suggest installing Vista on a separate partition rather than running it on a virtual machine because hard drives are so cheap these days.

    Seb Nilsson : That was not the problem. I want to be able to easily copy my VPCs around. Make up to 4-5 copies with different setups, but with the same base-line. One template, one VS2005, one VS2008 SP2 Beta and so on. Also to easily transport images between multiple computers on, for example, an USB-stick.
    From GateKiller
  • You can try and cut stuff out with vLite, but unless you cut out a real lot it's not going to save a ton of drive space. Here's your best bets:

    • Disable Hibernate and run disk cleanup to remove any hibernation file.
    • Disable System restore entirely and use disk cleanup to remove all restore points... this will save an enormous amount of space.
    • Disable SuperFetch (since it kills your VM hard drive with it's crazy usage)
    • Minimize the size of your pagefile by setting a smaller static size and make sure to assign lots of memory to your VM to compensate.
    • Use the disk utilities to shrink your VM drive down as far as possible.

    Once you have the base machine configured, I would suggest using VMware workstation and the awesome Linked Clones feature, which will let you create a completely new VM based on the base machine, but only using a portion of the space.

    I would not advise running a Vista VM from a USB flash drive, it will be slower than dirt.

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