How to shrink Vista as much as possible

[castagna]

I've just received my new X300 and since I have been working on unix/linux OS's for 20 years
I will mainly use it with Fedora. However I plan to keep Vista for a dual boot configuration (to
use it a couple of times per months). Now, on the X300 disk space is tough (60G) so I would
like to keep Vista occupation as low as possible. This means:

- Getting rid of all unwanted software shipped by lenovo (antivirus, office trial versions,
AOL, etc).

-Shrinking the partition so that I have just the space for install few handy programs (e.g. firefox,
thunderbird, a couple of games, some programs that run just in Windows)

- Getting rid of the Recovery partitions and checkpoints.

What are your suggestions (gparted or vista's shrink, reinstall from scratch of Vista, . . . ), and
especially what errors must I avoid?

Thanks in advance

---Beppe---

[bobbarker]

There is a program called nLite that will (for Vista, I think) strip it down to whatever you want and make it pretty small. There is an "release" of Vista called "TinyVista," which is just regular Vista stripped with nLite.

[Scoob]

Actually vLite. nLite is for Xp.

http://www.vlite.net/about.html

[j-dawg]

Vista is a big OS, so you'll have a hard time keeping anything less than fifteen to twenty gigs for Vista usable.

Lenovo's installation of Vista is even bigger than normal, so yes, a fresh install sans the extra stuff would probably be advisable. You may also want to remove the Rescue and Recovery partition, which takes up a few gigs of space.

[Superego]

I would go with gparted. I've always had good results with it. As far the housecleaning goes, I second removing the R&R partition, but after you've made your recovery disks (if you haven't already and making a complete backup. To really slim down Vista (oxymoron) you'll probably want to do a fresh install. I know there are guides posted on this forum for making a clean XP install, but I don't know about Vista (haven't had to use it).

Are you absolutely tied to Fedora? Since space is an issue and you seem comfortable with Linux would you consider another, smaller OS? Something like Arch comes to mind.

[castagna]

Thank you for all your answers. Here you are what I did so that these instructions may be helpful to others. I was able to slim down Vista disk space to less than 10Gb. I followed the instructions here http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=144783 and reinstalled ThinkVantage Upgrade Services and used it to reinstall the few thinkvantage applications I need.

Then I used Vista tool to erase the recovery partition and shrink the main one. Unfortunately Vista does not move blocks so if you are not lucky you will gain no space (I was proposed to have a vista partition of 43G, totally unacceptable). So I downloaded PerfectDisk http://www.raxco.com/products/downloadit/ since you have a 30 days evaluation copy, asked to compact free space at the beginning, including system files and then wop, now by the Vista Disk Management's Shrink Partition I could reduce the Vista partition down to 15Gb. I finally decided to go for 22Gb ... and now I'm happily writing this post from my Fedora install on the X300.

Please note that this summary is the result of a couple of days of trials and errors (good-bye week-end). For instance I always failed to resize the partition using standard linux tools. Finally for what it concerns why I stick with Fedora, well I have 5 computers with it (work + home) so I prefer not to change (but form my Mummy, who is 65 years old I installed Ubuntu). Also I head an academic research group that ships a programming language for XML, that is included in the major linux distributions and I am the one in our group that follows more or less the Fedora package (I'm surrounded by a mob of Ubuntunian, Debians, MacOSXixian ... we also ship WinXP version but had to ask external help). By the way if you are fed up with XPath and XSLT verbosity and slow and untypedness, have a glance to http://www.cduce.org

And after this short spamming , let me renew my thanks to for your suggestions

[mariner]

One crucial step in shrinking the Windows partition is to disable virtual memory (the paging file) before defragmenting.