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!
