First of all it looks strange that our forum has a special place for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, MacOSX but that it doesn't have a M$ specific subforum
.
That's why we have been posting little Windows tools here at the Anything not related to video forum
.
Now I know that some of you might have heard of nLite.
Some of you might even dislike it because of some tiny little bugs that still haunt this tool.
But when this baby hits 1.0 Final it's going to be a live saviour.
Some of it's features:
- Service Pack Integration (Neat feature)
- Components Removal (watch out!)
- Unattended Setup (Another neat feature)
- Driver Integration (Extremely neat feature!)
- Hotfixes Integration (Yet another extremely neat feature
)
- Tweaks (Nice to have feature)
- Patches (Nice to have feature)
- Bootable ISO creation
nLite site is here
http://www.nliteos.com/.
If downloads section is your way
hit here
http://www.nliteos.com/download.html.
This tool needs M$ .Net framework 1.1 to work but if you don't like the whole .Net hanging around in your PC you can download a small footprint
.Net just for nLite from their site.
Just go down to the downloads section and search for
Alternative Runtimes v1.0.2 for nLite
nLite works for Win2K, WinXP and Win2K3.
Now let's say that you:
- have a genuine M$ XP Pro CD without any Service Pack
- would like to have XP SP2 on it
- would like to get rid of some of XPs addons like Windows Media Player and MSN Messenger
- would like to integrate your Motherboard SATA drivers (that might not be available in the original XP CD) so that you can install XP in your SATA disk without needing a diskette and pushing F6 during textmode install
- would like to include all M$ XP Hotfixes so that you end up with a very much up to date installation CD when it comes to vulnerabilities.
- would like to have Windows Explorer status bar always visible and maybe un-hide extentions of well known file types on every installation from that CD
All that you can do with nuhi's nLite tool.
It is capable of more...how should I say...radical things like removing Internet Explorer and Outlook Express but that's up to you to decide if you want these removed.
I do because I use Firefox and Thunderbird so I don't need those.
But once in a while I still find a site or homepage that FF won't open (or will open with errors)...
Something that is expected to be solved only in FF 1.5.
Back to the subject.
With nLite you can download all well known M$ hotfixes and patch your new CD with them.
But sometimes this doesn't work so good because of dependencies in hotfixes...
That's why another guy - RyanVM - built a special update pack that can be used with or without nLite.
Get it here
http://ryanvm.msfn.org/.
You will want to download the
RyanVM's Windows XP Post-SP2 Update Pack 2.0 and the
RVM Integrator 1.0 although you won't need the Integrator if you use nLite.
I've been using an nLited XP Pro SP2 with RyanVM's 07/2005 M$ hotfixes and I have only come up with a bug.
That is the SFC bug.
Sometimes when I finish installing a new software (that upgrades some M$ Dlls) windows alerts me that something has just over written these files.
SFC will then give me the option to keep it that way or to go back to copies of the previous files.
It's very annoying but it has been happening much less often than it used to.
Nuhi thinks he will fix this before he puts out 1.0Final.
Hope you find this usefull.
Cheers
