Raybo58

I have serveral versions of XP that I've been playing with in VMware. I guess the leanest among them is rootw0rm's Turbo XP SP3. It's had most of the resource hogs nLite'd out. You can still call IE though. As far as I know, IE doesn't use any resources unless you actually launch it. So I'm not sure why you'd try cull it.

Thank you Strel, You're info was correct. That shaves another 40 minutes or more off a typical installation.

First I want to thank you DS. With the help of your guide and Tomcats info I was able to accomplish what I set out to do. I started out with a version of XP that already had SP3 integrated into it. My goal was to create a new unattended version that had all the updates and hotfixes to date, including DotNet35. As far as I can tell, it worked splendidly. The only thing scratching at my OCD now is this... I didn't bother with KB959772 because I've never heard of anyone actually buying music from microsoft, and would discourage any of my clients from doing so. I skipped the service pack for .NET 1.1 because I read here somewhere that 1.1 was obsolete anyway. But did I miss installing something potentially useful to cause MS to list KB951847 among my needs? Or perhaps the better question is, should I care? While I'm here I might as well take a whack at the only other bump in my road... On the disk I started with, there are a couple of .reg files in the $OEM$ folder with long lists of performance and visual tweaks, which I can confirm are being merged into the registry. Some of the entries seem to conflict with tweaks in other .cmd and nlite files, so I'd like to get rid of them after I gleen what I like. But first I want to figure out how they are being installed in the first place. I've looked through all the .sif, .cmd, .inf and .bat files I can find and none of them seems to refer to these .reg files. Is it the case that .reg files in the $OEM$ folder are automatically imported, or do I need to keep looking?

Personally, I love XP Pro x64. Coupled with some beefy hardware it's as snappy as anything I've seen, especially with apps that have been developed to take advantage of it. But it can be something of a pain finding drivers, since this is probably THE most neglected version of the MS platform. Because MS wants (is forcing) everyone to buy their new junk, support is skimpy to say the least. As you know, XP primary support was supposed to expire years ago. So those of us with Mavrick versions have to fend for ourselves. Upon his request, I downgraded a friend's laptop from Vist to XP x64. It litterally took days, and a spelunking trip into a Google translated Japanese website to find some drivers for the built in hardware on his HP Purchase. It's been a year and a half and, while he's for the most part still thrilled with it, I still get occasional calls asking me if I've found a way to make his I-Tunes burn CDs. Which is why I no longer reccomend it to any but the most skillful users. The rewards are worth it though and there's always a workaround. When worst come to worst, VMware runs XP x32 faster on my box than I've ever seen it run on a physical machine. That is if you've got at least 4 Gigs of ram so that neither the host or guest go thirsty.

I've learned a lot from your members, so I guess it's time to do my part. I've been developing and doing computer repair for over 30 years, and still learning. From punch cards and paper tape to my new 32gig flash stick. I only wish life had a reset button so I could be around to see what this all comes to 100 years from now.