Be a knock-off Nigel
In recent weeks, I've been experimenting with a nifty little "product". It's TinyXP: a sort of Windows distribution, a hand-rolled version of Windows XP that you can download via Bittorrent, burn onto CD and bung on your PC.
It's XP with almost every optional component removed, all the latest patches and bugfixes pre-loaded, including SP3, and optionally, even Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and Windows Media Player stripped out too. There's an optional pack of drivers and so on that you can choose, and a "bare" version with nothing that's not absolutely necessary.
It's pretty good. Illegal as all hell, of course, yes, but not the sort of crime you're ever going to get done for. It passes "Windows Genuine Authentication" and so on, so you can install things like Windows Defender on it, or IE7. It's smaller than normal XP, faster to install, faster to boot and takes significantly less memory - in fact, its default footprint is even smaller than Windows 2000.
I've always meant to build something like this myself, but though I have a custom XP build with a lot of the crap removed, I've never even looked at things like breaking Windows Activation.
TinyXP is pretty handy, though - I've put it on a couple of PCs I've given away on Freecycle recently. With a small fast version of XP, there's not a lot of reason to put Windows 2000 on low-spec PCs any more.
But I've also been looking for a copy of Vista to play with. I had a suspicion that in the same way that I can cut a few hundred meg of the install-disk size of XP, 50MB or so off its memory footprint and 10-15min off the install time, that I might be able to cut the crap from Vista and get it down to a civilized size.
Well, a couple of days ago, it occurred to me to look, and sure enough, the same "eXPer1ence" hacker that produced TinyXP has also produced TinyVista. It's Vista, complete with Aero, but with no background search, no sidebar, no superfetch, almost no bundled apps, but plenty of drivers (excluding printers - they've all gone.)
So I've downloaded it and in a quiet moment this evening put it on my Thinkpad, alongside the kosher IBM copy of XP.
And it's not half bad. It recognised most of the hardware in my X31, and between my folder of IBM drivers and Windows Update, everything is working. It idles at 345MB of RAM, a bit more than XP, but not too bad on a PC with 1GB. It's taking up a bit over 2GB of disk.
I can't see a lot of reason to recommend it over XP, but if all you have is a Vista licence and you hate the bloat, this is an option worth exploring. If, of course, you don't mind stealing from Microsoft. But then, Bill Gates is still the 2nd richest man in the world, and he achieved that position through theft himself, so personally, I can live with that.
I can't point directly to download links. Go to IsoHunt or some other Torrent index (e.g. The Pirate Bay or MiniNova), type in "tinyxp" or "tinyvista", and look for a recent release with lots of trackers and seeds. Download the minute Torrent file, open it in a Bittorrent client (I use Transmission myself, but Windows types might try μTorrent)... And wait a couple of days. Then burn it to a blank CD - use the "burn image" option in CD Burner XP or some other CD-burning app.
Boot the recipient PC, tell it what partition to use and enjoy. There are no keys to enter, no usernames or any of that, and it all happens rather quickly.
It's XP with almost every optional component removed, all the latest patches and bugfixes pre-loaded, including SP3, and optionally, even Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and Windows Media Player stripped out too. There's an optional pack of drivers and so on that you can choose, and a "bare" version with nothing that's not absolutely necessary.
It's pretty good. Illegal as all hell, of course, yes, but not the sort of crime you're ever going to get done for. It passes "Windows Genuine Authentication" and so on, so you can install things like Windows Defender on it, or IE7. It's smaller than normal XP, faster to install, faster to boot and takes significantly less memory - in fact, its default footprint is even smaller than Windows 2000.
I've always meant to build something like this myself, but though I have a custom XP build with a lot of the crap removed, I've never even looked at things like breaking Windows Activation.
TinyXP is pretty handy, though - I've put it on a couple of PCs I've given away on Freecycle recently. With a small fast version of XP, there's not a lot of reason to put Windows 2000 on low-spec PCs any more.
But I've also been looking for a copy of Vista to play with. I had a suspicion that in the same way that I can cut a few hundred meg of the install-disk size of XP, 50MB or so off its memory footprint and 10-15min off the install time, that I might be able to cut the crap from Vista and get it down to a civilized size.
Well, a couple of days ago, it occurred to me to look, and sure enough, the same "eXPer1ence" hacker that produced TinyXP has also produced TinyVista. It's Vista, complete with Aero, but with no background search, no sidebar, no superfetch, almost no bundled apps, but plenty of drivers (excluding printers - they've all gone.)
So I've downloaded it and in a quiet moment this evening put it on my Thinkpad, alongside the kosher IBM copy of XP.
And it's not half bad. It recognised most of the hardware in my X31, and between my folder of IBM drivers and Windows Update, everything is working. It idles at 345MB of RAM, a bit more than XP, but not too bad on a PC with 1GB. It's taking up a bit over 2GB of disk.
I can't see a lot of reason to recommend it over XP, but if all you have is a Vista licence and you hate the bloat, this is an option worth exploring. If, of course, you don't mind stealing from Microsoft. But then, Bill Gates is still the 2nd richest man in the world, and he achieved that position through theft himself, so personally, I can live with that.
I can't point directly to download links. Go to IsoHunt or some other Torrent index (e.g. The Pirate Bay or MiniNova), type in "tinyxp" or "tinyvista", and look for a recent release with lots of trackers and seeds. Download the minute Torrent file, open it in a Bittorrent client (I use Transmission myself, but Windows types might try μTorrent)... And wait a couple of days. Then burn it to a blank CD - use the "burn image" option in CD Burner XP or some other CD-burning app.
Boot the recipient PC, tell it what partition to use and enjoy. There are no keys to enter, no usernames or any of that, and it all happens rather quickly.