Have you ever heard about a utility called Nlite? If you haven’t, maybe its time we give it a try. Before getting into details, I’ll share my experience about how I came to know about this wonderful utility.
When I bought My Dell M1330 Laptop 6 months back, It came with Windows Vista Pre-installed. Visa is fine, its a very nice and easy operating system. But for some reason (had to do a project in VB6), I needed Windows XP badly. At that time, I had a valid Windows XP license as well. All I got to do is to install it on my machine. Unfortunately, the XP cd I had did not have any support for SATA drivers. Obviosusly, SATA being relatively new technology, there were not supporting drivers. This is when i started looking for some way around this.
I had SATA drivers for XP downloaded from Dell, I had my original XP installation cd lying beside, but there was no way to use them together for a fresh installation. As usual, started googling and after a bit of searching, found this golden tool. Using this tool, we can add a lot of stuff to the installation image. I think its better to stop my story here and read the information provided by the author:
Do checkout the products home page for latest version.
Deployment tool for the bootable unattended windows installation
Nlite http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html
Have you ever wanted to remove Windows components like Media Player, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, MSN Explorer, Messenger…
How about not even to install them with Windows ?
nLite is a tool for pre-installation Windows configuration and component removal at your choice. Optional bootable image ready for burning on media or testing in virtual machines.
With nLite you will be able to have Windows installation which on install does not include, or even contain on media, the unwanted components.
Features
- Service Pack Integration
- Component Removal
- Unattended Setup
- Driver Integration *
- Hotfixes Integration **
- Tweaks
- Services Configuration
- Patches ***
- Bootable ISO creation
* - Textmode (CD Boot) and normal PnP
** - hotfixes with white icons, *KB*.exe, including update packs
and Internet Explorer 7
***- supports generic SFC, Uxtheme, TcpIp and Usb Polling patching.
nLite supports Windows 2000, XP x86/x64 and 2003 x86/x64 in all languages.
It needs .NET Framework 2.0 in order to run… Check if you have it already, maybe on some of your CDs before downloading if your connection is slow.
http://home.midmaine.com/~nlite/nlite/nlite-1.4.1.installer.exe
