I just bought a Dell Vostro Notebook with Vista Home Premium and it came with a Vista OS disk (to my surprise) I was thinking how nice it would be to slipstream this disk and reinstall Vista minus all the Dell and google bloat wear they shipped my laptop with. Not to mention, it would be nice to remove a lot of the extra vista features I don't want.

My question is, can I do this with this Dell recovery/OS disk using Vlite?

I've made many XP slipstreamed disks using Nlite and Normal Windows XP disks but I'm afraid to try this one.

Anyone have any expereince on this topic?

The Dell Vista disc I received a couple of weeks ago was very clean and was not that different to the M$ RTM from Nov'06.

On the DVD there is an added $OEM$ folder for dell specific stuff, you can delete all of it's contents except:

X:\SOURCES\$OEM$\$$\SYSTEM32\OEM\DELL.XRM-MS which, along with X:\SOURCES\PID.TXT activates Vista for you.

Also in X:\SOURCES is the addition of imagex.exe and wimgapi.dll which doesn't do any harm (it's for managing the wim images).

The boot.wim and install.wim do have some minor changes to them, a couple of extra and updated drivers compared to the RTM - I would expect the same minor differences from dvds that are on store shelves today, one year later...

The recovery image (#1) of boot.wim also has a customised dell restoration option added which (I'd guess) you'd use to restore the wim that's kept on the recovery partition.

Only other difference is the lack of a UDF filesystem which means all filenames are UPPERCASE.TXT!

As it's pretty much the same as a retail disc it has all the other editions so why not 'test' another?

Edited November 25, 200718 yr by jamieo