The fight for megabytes on the Eee PC 701 4G

    After unpacking and turning on the brand-new Asus Eee PC 701 4G with installed Windows XP Home from Eldorado, you will find that on its 4GB hard drive there is only about 1.5 gigabytes of free disk space, and after installing updates for Windows XP, IE7, .NET Framework, His JRE will remain somewhere around 600-700 megabytes. Thinking to myself that this state of affairs didn’t suit me at all, I decided to free up space on the SSD as much as possible and that's what came of it.

    The first thought was to clean the installed system to the maximum. Removing MS Work (399 MB), all applications related to Windows Live, cleaning the Windows folder from the garbage left by Windows Update, disabling the page file. As a result, I managed to free 1.9 GB of free space, and this, taking into account the installed JRE (110 MB) and Opera (13 MB), is in my opinion a good result, but the idea that Win XP takes about 1.5 gigabytes did not let me rest on my laurels.

    Googling brought to the forum http://forum.eeeuser.com/ , and then through the topic to the page Ultimate XP HOW-TO Guide: XP SP2, 537MB install size, Boots in 17sec- A detailed guide on how to create and install on an Eee PC Windows XP Home Edition SP2 with a size of 537 MB and a boot time of 17 seconds, and most importantly, no Windows XP FLP and Game Edition.

    The main idea is to use the very useful free utility nLite . This utility allows you to create your own lightweight distribution based on the original Win XP distribution kit, throwing out "unnecessary" components, drivers, applications, etc. from it. On the recommendation of the author of the manual, I downloaded nLite 1.4.1

    To use the native distribution of Win XP from the disk that came with the laptop did not work because of the names of the folders. For nLite, the distribution should be in the I386 folder, and on the ASUS drive, this folder was called i386XP. Fortunately, the OEM distribution from the beechjutsu-siemens was lying around and nLite ate it very well.

    The nLite program has support for Russian, but I would recommend using English, so as not to confuse anything due to the translation. The manual provides detailed screenshots of nLite, at each stage of creating your own distribution kit, and they are made in the English version.

    Following the instructions and screenshots at the output, I got an ISO image of a boot disk with a lightweight WinXP distribution, I didn’t remove everything that the author recommended (left the games, DHCP client, Media Player and other little things) and its size turned out to be somewhere around 150 MB .

    Further:
    1. Reinstalled the system from the resulting disk.
      Installed the drivers from the native disk. I
      configured the Wi-Fi, updated and installed IE7 via Windows Update. I
      deleted all folders with names beginning with "$" in C: \ Window and the contents of the folders C: \ Windows \ SoftwareDistribution \ Download \ and C: \ Windows \ ie7 updates (garbage from updates)
      Disabled the page file (I expanded the memory to 2 GB and no need for swap), hibernated, set 5% info for system recovery, disabled disk indexing

      As a result, I got the installed licensed Windows XP Home Edition SP2, with the latest updates installed, install IE IE, Media Player 11, which occupies C drive: only 750 MB and as much as 2.9 GB of free space, which I wish for all its publishers.

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