Mister Brian

Awesome. Thanks, 3Aces. Lesson learned: * MDAC is required for the Office 2000 Professional installer.

Session file uploaded. LAST_SESSION.INI

Here's the error, which comes up after I tell office where to install to. I made sure to leave in the Jet DE. What component did I remove that I shouldn't have? TIA

I'm trying to install Windows XP to my SD card, which is in a USB SD card reader. When I pop in a CD to install XP, it asks which drive I want to install to. I choose P:, the SD card. It reports that the installer can not access that disk, and that maybe I should have hit F6 to load drivers for it. Well, XP can mount that card even without any additional drivers. What gives, and how can I install XP to this card? Nevermind why I want to (it's so I can eliminate the HDD from the box) or that it's unwise to install an OS to a SD card (the card is expendable; besides, by disabling swap and most logging, I'll keep writes under control). Thanks in advance.

This thread desperately needs a screenshot of a lightweight XP. XP on my old laptop uses 37MB RAM at the desktop. As a more apples-to-apples comparison, my desktop's XP sits on 100MB RAM at the desktop, with start-up applications like e-mail, firewall, d-tools running. 200MB is a nice achievement for Vista. Did you disable most of the Services? However, to claim that XP is heavier than Vista is just silly.

Try MS VPC 2007? Install XP on a virtual PC that runs atop Vista, and use that to run nLite. It's a little silly, but hey. It might work.

emodel, when I installed the full version of Vista on my PC and saw that it sat on eight GB of my HDD, my jaw dropped. Then when I saw how much RAM it was using, I was appalled. vLite helped, but it's my impression that a lightened Vista is never going to beat a lightened XP. I timed my boots with a stopwatch. Vista - 60s to desktop, no apps installed. XP - 20s to desktop, then it loads apps for 15s. I don't think I'm the only poweruser who's going to wait until I own a DirectX 10 video card and games that require it, to switch to Vista.

Thanks, Jeremy, that's exactly what I was looking for. That's a beautiful program. I've added it to my toolbox. Cluberti, that's an interesting command. Not particularly usable, though; I'd have to look up the proper name of each Service. Maybe if I were scripting.

Vista, XP, 2000. Running services.msc calls mmc.exe, which isn't a nice program to work with. It takes six clicks to set a service to Auto, Man, Disabled. There's no reason it couldn't be one click. That comment I made about service descriptions refers to the ones whose description is "If you disable this service, any programs that rely on this service will be unable to start...".

Is there one? mmc should have radio buttons for Automatic, Manual, Disabled, for example. Real descriptions of each service, rather than vague threats, would also be appreciated.

I have a high-end rig, and I don't like to wait more milliseconds than necessary for the computer to respond to my input. I thought I'd try Vista, because Superfetch and the futureproof nature of Vista appeal to me. Using vLite and disabling Services, I was able to get it down to 280MB RAM used at idle. Naturally, I've disabled drive indexing and Aero. It looks and feels like a bloated version of XP, and it takes four times as long as XP to boot up. Am I missing some opportunity to lighten Vista up? Can you get it to boot in less than 90 seconds (on a 2.2GHz dual core machine with a 50MB/s hard drive and 2GB RAM)? Note that I removed pretty much everything vLite could remove, until it fit on a CD.