timmer

you can't just compare a 'vlited' vista with a normal vista, because there are a gzillion options that make up a vlited vista. i can confirm that a full installation of vista ultimate on my laptop ran like an old dog (with many services disabled etc), so slow that it was unusable. the minimal vlite installation i have now runs very respectably. so yes, there are performance benefits to using vlite.

not everyone pays the retail price for their vista installation. for example if you are an MSDN subscriber or have volume licensing. upgrading to vista cost me nothing. if you buy a car and remove the rear seats because that suits your purpose, then it doesn't void the decision to buy the car in the first place, it's still a great car. people can and will do whatever they want with vista, and it seems like a waste of time trying to argue with them.

as a c# developer i have the following basic software requirements, it is only a laptop and as such is a minimal working set of software: - vista ultimate with SP1 - office 2007 ultimate - visual studio 2008 professional - firefox - VLC media player - AVG antivirus I have installed all this software on a 8Gb virtual machine, it takes only 4.3 Gb + 1Gb swap file = 2.7 Gb of usable space. it's not a very good laptop so i will also greatly benefit from removing unwanted services that cause massive amounts of disk IO, such as error reporting, restore service, windows defender, etc. so far, it runs like a charm. it is also a benefit to remove these services permanently rather then just disable them, as various Windows Updates have in the past enabled certain services that were disabled.

actually yes, i'm using vLite to install Vista on my laptop with an 8Gb IDE/compact flash drive, and i could do it on a 4Gb drive as well if i wanted to. SSDs with their relatively small capacities have generated a massive interest in small OS installations, and vLite is the best tool available for achieving this, IMHO.