benefits of nLite

[flyingpants]

in 95% of the cases, you don't know exactly enough what you are "getting rid of".

You'r system will probably take less space, install faster, wil run 'faster'  , but in despite of what?-> you don't know for 100% sure.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

nope. removing the yellow dog, and things like TFTP.EXE is not dangerous at all.

nlite is not innovative software at all, no. it just simplifies the task of making your own XP.

[Dreadnort]

Nlite for me is a fantastic tool that alows me to be extremely flexible about what is and isn't installed on my system.

For example, Windows installs games, sounds, wallpapers and screensavers. Before Nlite I would just have had to put up with these, as I NEVER use any of them. I prefer Windows to be seen and not heard, the games hold no interest for me and I normally use a blank screen as my background.

With Nlite, I can remove all these annoyances directly from the source, thus freeing up some space and lessen a little aggravation.

Then we move onto drivers. I have an Nforce 2 motherboard which XP doesn't actually support natively (i.e. no drivers). I also have an Nvida GFX card and Audigy 2 sound card. Whilst there are drivers within Windows that do support them, they are horribly outdated. By default Windows has drivers for a wide range of products, most of which I don't have or never will have.

Once again Nlite steps in and can strip out all those useless drivers for hardware I don't have any use for.

SATA drives are now becoming very much the standard HDD, however if you want Windows XP to install on one, you need to have a floppy drive handy with the drivers on a disk. More and more computers these days are ditching FDD's because writable CD's & DVD's have made them pretty much obselete. Nlite can integrate these and drivers for all my hardware into XP, meaning that it is kept bang up to date and I never have to install any additional drivers.

The numerous hotfixes that come out monthly can all take up alot of space. I had a friend who recently had to reinstall Windows, using his PRE SP1 retail copy. After he'd done all the hotfixes and updates, his Windows folder alone was 2Gb+. With Nlite you can keep your Windows source prefectly updated either by integrating Service packs and hotfixes individually or using the ever popular RyanVM update packs. Either way the end result is the same, A much more efficient and less bug ridden Windows installation.

Next we move on to software. MSN Messenger, the Windows Firewall/Security Centre and Defrag may be perfectly fine for the average joe user, but many of us use far better software or in the case of MSN Mesenger updated software. Therefore why do we need to bother having these programs installed with Windows, if we are simply going to install our own choices. The answer is, we don't have to. Nlite allows us the freedom to choose what we want and what we don't want.

It seems that with each new version of Windows, we have had less control over what is installed. For example Windows 95 & 98 allowed us a fair amount of freedom over what we could install during installation, but this seemed to be massively curtailed when XP was introduced. It became simply a case of take it or leave it and we could only remove items AFTER windows had completed installing. Even then, many things were hidden, that could only be uncovered by editing entries in sysoc.inf and how many people REALLY knew about that back then.

In essence Nlite is all about being able to take back control of Windows and tailoring it to suit your needs, and not what Microsoft thinks are your needs. Couple Nlite with automated unattended installation of my favourite software and I end up with a system that is ready to be used straight away, no messing about installing any extra drivers or having to download Winamp or Winrar or whatever.

I get all this power and versatility and it doesn't cost me a penny. XPLite, Nlite's closest rival does the removal part, but if you want the full range of features, you have to pay. Also it does it's removing after Windows has been installed. Something I think has far more potential to cause problems then Nlite's method.

Edited September 10, 2005 by Dreadnort