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On Windows clutter
Jun. 29th, 2006 01:11 amJust happened across a perceptive blog post about the virtues of Windows 2000 over later versions. Some good points there.
As for a way of alleviating a little of the worst of the pain of XP, though, I have finally got around to trying a rather marvellous little tool called nLite. This runs under Windows - it requires .Net 2.0 and Installer 3 and benefits from 256+ colours & to a lesser extent a big screen. What nLite does is this. You copy a Windows installation CD onto your hard disk. You then run nLite and point it at this copy. It then lets you customise it extensively: you can preload a service pack, patches, hotfixes or drivers into the installation files. You can remove Windows components, to a massive degree - you can remove drivers, "integrated" features like Internet Explorer or even DHCP, almost anything. You can preconfigure the install process - preload user names, accounts, licence keys, whatever. You can set up the new install's desktop: turn off the themes, remove "shortcut to" from names, tweak the desktop, lots of things. Then you can make a bootable CD of the result, ready to be installed.
(Lots of this you can do anyway, if you know how. With nLite, it's as easy as a few clicky-buttons, and nLite is completely free.)
I've just tried it. It works a treat. It let me remove a lot of the dross from a new install of XP - no Outlook Express, no Media Player, no Windows Messenger, no Teletubby™ theme &c &c, making a new copy of Windows smaller, leaner, faster, quicker to install - the time estimates are now way over - and significantly reducing the vulnerability to 'sploits. I wish I'd tried this before I'd installed![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coth's machine!
As it is, though,the_major now has her new PC in and working. It's a 2.66GHz Pentium D 805, overclocked to 3.2GHz (so far), with a gig of RAM, 256M passively-cooled GeForce card, twin 17" NEC Multisync monitors (from Freecycle), PSU donated by ednun & a 160G SATA disk, with DVD burner, floppy with integral card reader, and a funky black case with a window that glows Cerenkov blue within and flashes as you use it. (Because we could.)
OK, so, it does sound like a fanheater, 'cos it's a hot chip and needs a lot of cooling, but as she accumulates some more money, she can fit quieter components and gradually silence it. (Replace the 80mm fans with 120mm ones, maybe liquid cool it, add a passively-cooled PSU or just a bigger one that doesn't have to work so hard...) She could even replace the cheapo P4 spaceheater CPU with a Core2 thing in a year or so. But still, despite the noise, it's an awful lot of PC for about £400 new and it's very, very quick.
Now all I have to do is find a Linux distro with a new enough kernel that it can understand the motherboard. I've tried Ubuntu, Xandros, Knoppix and various others - nothing can see the optical drive. They boot off it, but they can't mount it, so they can't install. Neither can DOS, either MS-DOS 7, FreeDOS or DR-DOS, not even Asus' supplied boot CD. But we shall overcome!
Finally, I am amused to note that whereas last yearmarypcb confidently told me that WinFS had not been dropped, it was just, you know, delayed a bit... MS has now announced that WinFS has now been discontinued as a standalone product or additional component. Well, that's a surprise.
As for a way of alleviating a little of the worst of the pain of XP, though, I have finally got around to trying a rather marvellous little tool called nLite. This runs under Windows - it requires .Net 2.0 and Installer 3 and benefits from 256+ colours & to a lesser extent a big screen. What nLite does is this. You copy a Windows installation CD onto your hard disk. You then run nLite and point it at this copy. It then lets you customise it extensively: you can preload a service pack, patches, hotfixes or drivers into the installation files. You can remove Windows components, to a massive degree - you can remove drivers, "integrated" features like Internet Explorer or even DHCP, almost anything. You can preconfigure the install process - preload user names, accounts, licence keys, whatever. You can set up the new install's desktop: turn off the themes, remove "shortcut to" from names, tweak the desktop, lots of things. Then you can make a bootable CD of the result, ready to be installed.
(Lots of this you can do anyway, if you know how. With nLite, it's as easy as a few clicky-buttons, and nLite is completely free.)
I've just tried it. It works a treat. It let me remove a lot of the dross from a new install of XP - no Outlook Express, no Media Player, no Windows Messenger, no Teletubby™ theme &c &c, making a new copy of Windows smaller, leaner, faster, quicker to install - the time estimates are now way over - and significantly reducing the vulnerability to 'sploits. I wish I'd tried this before I'd installed
coth's machine! As it is, though,
the_major now has her new PC in and working. It's a 2.66GHz Pentium D 805, overclocked to 3.2GHz (so far), with a gig of RAM, 256M passively-cooled GeForce card, twin 17" NEC Multisync monitors (from Freecycle), PSU donated by ednun & a 160G SATA disk, with DVD burner, floppy with integral card reader, and a funky black case with a window that glows Cerenkov blue within and flashes as you use it. (Because we could.) OK, so, it does sound like a fanheater, 'cos it's a hot chip and needs a lot of cooling, but as she accumulates some more money, she can fit quieter components and gradually silence it. (Replace the 80mm fans with 120mm ones, maybe liquid cool it, add a passively-cooled PSU or just a bigger one that doesn't have to work so hard...) She could even replace the cheapo P4 spaceheater CPU with a Core2 thing in a year or so. But still, despite the noise, it's an awful lot of PC for about £400 new and it's very, very quick.
Now all I have to do is find a Linux distro with a new enough kernel that it can understand the motherboard. I've tried Ubuntu, Xandros, Knoppix and various others - nothing can see the optical drive. They boot off it, but they can't mount it, so they can't install. Neither can DOS, either MS-DOS 7, FreeDOS or DR-DOS, not even Asus' supplied boot CD. But we shall overcome!
Finally, I am amused to note that whereas last year
marypcb confidently told me that WinFS had not been dropped, it was just, you know, delayed a bit... MS has now announced that WinFS has now been discontinued as a standalone product or additional component. Well, that's a surprise.
