Making a WinXP 32bit for World of Warcraft only?

[RamGuy]

Hi,

I'm making my Dell Latitude D531 laptop into a "World of Warcraft only" computer, the aim is make WinXP 32bit as slim, light and fast as possible while the WoW compatibility still exists?

As there really aren't that many new WinXP 32bit updates coming, I don't really need either internet browser, windows time, windows update or any of that stuff.. I just need the stuff that makes the operative system boot and work, along with the stuff required for making World of Warcraft and .NET FrameWork to work!

Do any of you have a *.inf file that I can use? Or some tips and tweaks for me?

[albator]

remove indexing service it will speed up XP, also if you can use a third party backup application, remove system restore.

You could reduce xp to about 200 meg iso...

[Richard Arkless]

wow you must be a mega fan of wow

make sure u keep dx and opengl

Edited February 7, 2009 by Richard Arkless

[drfakeacc]

If this should be really only for WoW, i think it might be easier to say, what to keep.

remove everything not mentioned:

-Drivers(at this point, I would suggest to manually integrate the spüecific drivers, rather than keeping the generic-ones from MS):

Ethernet (LAN), SCSI/RAID, Wireless Ethernet (for all of these are "specific" drivers available, so you might be able to remove them as well)

-Hardware Support:

Battery, CPU AMD/Intel(depends on your hardware), Logical Disk Manager, Multi-Processor Support(if you have one), Smart Cards (if you have any)

-Multimedia:

DirectX, OpenGL Support, Speech Support, Windows Media Player, Windows Picture and Fax Viewer

-Network:

Internet Explorer, MSMail and MAPI, NWLink IPX/SPX NetBIOS Protocol, Vector Graphics Rendering (VML)

-Operation System Options:

File System Filter Manager, Format Drive Support, Internet Explorer Core, Jet Database Engine, Logon Notifications, MDAC, Out of Box Experience (OOBE), Visual Basic Runtime 5, Visual Basic Runtime 6, Visual Basic Scripting Support, Administrator VB scrips

-Services:

Automatic Upgrades, Background Intelligence Transfer Service (BITS), COM+, DHCP-Client, Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC), DNS Client, Event Log, Extensible Authentication Protocol Service, Health Key and Certificate Management Service, HTTP SSL, Internet Authentication (IAS), Kerberos, Message Queuing, Net Logon, NAP, Performance Logs, Protected Storage, Shell Services, System Monitor, Windows Management Instrumentation, Wired AutoConfig, Wireless Configuration(if you use W-LAN)

Should work, but better test before using.

[newsposter]

just shut off services.....

[Kelsenellenelvian]

Yes NEVER remove services just disable them, you never know what you might need in the future.

[drfakeacc]

If he uses it for WoW ONLY, it should work that way, even with Mic and W-LAN.

And for exactly that purpose, it works.

[albator]

I disagree, Indexing service should be removed.

[newsposter]

If a service is disabled, the code 'left behind' does nothing more than take up space on the hard drive.

On the other hand, if a service is removed, it's difficult to impossible to manually re-add it.

So do some searching on the forum here. Weekly and daily posts can be found from noobs asking how to replace things that shouldn't have been removed in the first place. There are practically NO posts from people who say that they regret not removing something.

Once services are disabled via nlite, a tool such as Sysinternals Autoruns is used to look at all of the device/service startups and further shut off (again DO NOT DELETE) things that appear to be unneeded. Autoruns has the abinity to take snapshots of before and after setups which maked reverting changes very easy.

If an error is made, or a service/driver is in fact needed, it is a simple matter to reset the services/drivers to start on boot.

Edited February 17, 2009 by newsposter

[albator]

Those topics are newbie complaints.

I prefer to remove indexing services and system restore, this way by default there are not installed and

I dont need to stop them and remove theirs artefacts.

But, this is good for me, not everyone. If RamGuy want to build a gaming machine, he could do a specialised install.