Remove unwanted programs from Windows Vista

Windows Vista ships and installs with a lot of programs and features that I do not need. I'm not only talking about games and wallpapers but also about Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer or support for Tablet PCs.

These applications and functions are nevertheless installed when you install Windows Vista and there is no way of disabling many of them during the installation.

That's were vlite comes into play. It can remove unwanted features and programs from Windows installation disks. This is a process that happens before the actual installation and you should note that it could lead to troubles with the installation of future Service Packs and patches from Microsoft. A Reverse Integration Guide is available at Winbeta.

vLite

Still, if you want to give this a try to save hard drive space and probably gain performance as well you've come to the right place. The first steps are to select the DVD drive that contains the Windows Vista installation DVD and a destination folder for the new ISO file that you are going to create.

Files are then copied to that new location and a screen called Task Selection appears. You basically select what you want to do here. The options are the following:

• Integration: integrate, that means add, patches, drivers and service packs and the like to the installation
• Components: Remove unwanted components that you do not need. Those components will not be included in the new installation DVD and will not be installed.
• Tweaks: A handful of helpful tweaks. You can turn off UAC - user account control - for instance.
• Unattended Setup: Automates the installation. The user has to enter several information like the product key during installation. This setting lets you enter those information before which means they will be burned to the DVD as well and you do not have to enter them during installation.
• Bootable ISO: If you want a bootable DVD enable this setting.

Go through each entry and add or remove components that you do not need. Dependencies are shown during selection and once you leave that menu which means you get a warning whenever you are missing a function or program that is important for another one that you want to keep. Make sure you click on Apply when you are finished to rebuild the DVD.

A pretty basic installation DVD that I created saw a file reduction of more than 5 Gigabytes, that's amazing don't you think?

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