Super-thin Windows for your Mac
I'm a huge fan of the blog Lifehacker in general, and they're definitely fans of VMware Fusion, having named us one of their top Apps of 2007.
But they have one specific series written by Adam Pash called "Hack Attacks" that are just especially awesome for the level of geekery they afford.
Adam has the rare ability to take complicated technical concepts and boil them down for general consumption, but then he goes a step further and robustly documents how to do what he's just explained. It's really cool.
Put that Windows on a Diet!
Adam published an awesome Hack Attack yesterday on slimming down your install of Windows for use as a virtual machine, inspired by his own use of VMware Fusion. He runs VMware Fusion to help him run Windows on Mac for a couple key apps that don't exist for Mac, and as such, he doesn't really need all the services and components that Windows XP ships with.
He talks about two strategies for stripping out or shutting down those services, nLite and GameXP, using which you can diminish the amount of RAM and hard drive space needed to run a Windows VM.
This, of course, can be useful in general for anyone looking to make an "Outlook Appliance" or "MS Project Appliance" or what have you, but is especially compelling when you think about the MacBook Air, and its fixed 2GB of RAM, and max of 80 GB of hard drive.
Check out Adam's post. You won't be disappointed!
It would be helpful if there were an unsupported VMWare profile that could be used. This would cut out a lot of effort for creating a lite version of XP.
Posted by: James | April 02, 2008 at 07:39 PM
Can you elaborate, James? What do you mean by "unsupported VMware profile"?
Posted by: Peter Kazanjy | April 03, 2008 at 09:59 AM
For example unsupported software. If someone more familiar with the vamware tools created an nLite profile to be used with XP, I am sure you would not want to "support" it.
The Bootcamp beta was a good example. Apple offered it, but if you called/emailed for support you wouldn't get any.
All I am saying is that you are pointing a lot of customers in the direction of a techy-tool that makes it easy to mess up an XP / 2000 install...
Posted by: James | April 04, 2008 at 12:43 AM
Could the Fusion team please provide some "best practices" information regarding
- nLite presets ("Last session.ini")
- VMware Fusion drivers to be used while installing XP?
As Fusion's EaysInstall for Win XP feature does not seem to support Win XP installation CD ISOs strippted down by nLite, a respective guide would be immensely helpful - also to the average Fusion user.
I am sure you have been able to check some nLite presets. It would be really helpful and highly valuable if you could share your experiences!
Thank you and best regards!
Posted by: fellowweb | May 12, 2009 at 02:31 AM