Hi there,

I came across nLite a few months ago...and made a Win2000 unattended install CD with no problems, but now I want to do the same with my Dell Inspiron 9300 with XP Pro.

I bought my Inspiron back in October of 2005, and ordered a OEM XP pro install CD so I can get rid of all the bloat. And it did...in a way. But there is still programs in the background running that I dont want. A friend of mine made a XP install CD with nLite and all he has is like 15 or so processes running in the background. The Dell OEM still has about 30+ processes running even when doing a clean install.

I havent attempted making a nLite version of it yet, so my question is....is it doable. To make a nLite install CD w/o all the services that I dont want? Will I have to copy files from the OEM CD? And does anyone know a How-To or a guide as to what needs to be done?

Thanks...

i was wondering if its possible to use OEM keys on a normal media center edition install, my mum recently bought a dell pc and when i checked it had 45 processes runnign as standard. i closed all the uneeded services and uninstalled most the free crap they include and got it down to 14 but i would prefer it if i could do a fresh install of media center using the oem key.

But there is still programs in the background running that I dont want. A friend of mine made a XP install CD with nLite and all he has is like 15 or so processes running in the background. The Dell OEM still has about 30+ processes running even when doing a clean install.

I havent attempted making a nLite version of it yet, so my question is....is it doable. To make a nLite install CD w/o all the services that I dont want?

Yes it is doable.

You're talking about two things: programs in the background and services. System services are easy to deal with by reg tweak and therefore are not related to DELL specifically. You don't need nLite to do that.

Programs would need further investigation as to what's in the DELL OEM CD. Most programs come on separate CDs so they can just be ignored if you don't want to install those.

There are only a few differances between the Dell CDs and The System Builder CDs and none of the will cause extra precesses to run. The differances are as follows:

The OEMBIOS files are different for activation

There is a winnt.sif file on the CD

The Intel SATA RAID drivers are integrated

There are additional files on the CD to put a shortcut to Dell Support on the start menu