Thanks for the great info. My motivation for shrinking down hosted versions of XP, is so the Virtual PC disk can fit into a Solid State Disk (also know as RAM disk). Programs there run faster (and quiter) since both OS and data are stored in RAM.
This is terrific! Wish I had the time to make a minimal XP VM like this myself. I’d probably not go quite as far as you-- I’d want to leave IIS and remote desktop access and a few other things like that in place. But having just spent two weekends banging my head against making the smallest VMs I could manage with Oracle databases and other apps pre-configured (the tightest one I could come up with compressed down to 5GB) seeing your example is a real inspiration. Maybe I can get down to an Oracle DB in Windows XP, compressed to fit on one DVD…
I was also using WinRAR, to make self-extracting images; maybe I should look at 7-Zip if it can do better.
If you need to defrag a win2k vm (Whitney degragger can’t), JKDefrag is excellent
http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/
After seeing this post, I was able to get my VMWare base XP Pro installation to 732MB. Using gzip (tar cvfz in Linux) I got it down to 269MB.
Amazing 
So I decided to screw around with Vista x64 for VMWare. I tried out vLite but every time I used a vLited installer it hangs before finishing install. Tried about 10 different configurations, at least.
You should release a new post on getting smaller Vista VMs
Look, the Biggest Problem in my point of view, is not descrease more and more the size, due to if it takes the max full size 600MB, is ok for CD-R using way, BUT the Bisggest problem is to make it
AUTOEXECUTABLE, without Instalation of MS Virtual PC, or even First Run of POrtable Virtual PC, the challenge is make it 100% self-extract to a c: (kepping 600Mg in c:) and after seft-extract, AUTORUN, 100% using NAT conection for internet, and all drivers call from Host PC, if anyone got this and win this challenge keep us informed, lets make some versions of this .rar -sefextract and post it on Torrent Trackers,
!!!
I’ll second the VMOptimizer recommendation. It saves tons of time, does a great job, and it’s a very inexpensive. One of the few pieces of software I was happy to buy.
And 7-Zip’s worth it when you get to files that size. I wrote up some info on it before here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2005/05/07/406074.aspx
I think one of the switch names may have changed in newer 7-Zip releases.
True, a lot of people don’t have 7-Zip installed, but it’s really easy to make an SFX (self-extracting zip), so you distribute an EXE file which unzips itself.
TweakStar.com is devoted to the application for Windows tuning called TweakStar. This application with user friendly interface will help you to tune the Windows Filesystem, Configuration and Appearance, remove Security and Privacy Leaks and some other categories. http://tweakstar.com/
Wow man, fantastic work, you’re my kind of creature, reducing the size of things and even compressing stuff, going out of your way to show the numbers after it’s done. Thanks a lot whoever you are!
I’m with a bit of a problem though: I’m on Linux, and I’m using an old beatup laptop that has a dying hard disk, I don’t have even 10GB of free space to even create my initial VM in order to start this shrinking process. (from this disk that is failing, I have this small 20GB partition on which I store all my “important” stuff, and I use Linux as a “live session” where it is not installed on disk… shit gets complicated I know…)
So is there a way that you could upload this magically wonderful compressed VM for me to download?
For most of my Windows needs, I use Wine, but I have a few specific programs that require Net Framework to be installed, and I’m having a tough time getting that to work inside of Wine, so I figured out maybe it would be easier to do all of this inside a VM then.
edit: For example, a default fresh Wine prefix uses around 60MB of space on disk, and I can get that compressed down to 12MB using TAR/GZ compression. With TAR/XZ it must be even more. Most of my backups these days I compress before storing them, makes a world of difference. So when I said up there that you’re my kind of creature, I relate completely to what you talked about. And let the whiners whine I guess…
Sorry for double posting, but an additional idea: it would be equally awesome if anyone could upload a fully working Wine Prefix with Net Framework already installed inside of it. I feel that could solve my problems too. Heck, I would even keep that file hosted for other people to use it as well. Thanks for the amazing voluntarist community out there.