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

virtual-pcwindows-vista

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.

Best Answer

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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