Windows 7 Image Size
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Looking for some advice or suggestions on how to slim down the Windows 7 image size. My company is moving to Windows 7 with the XP end of life rapidly approaching and I noticed that the images are 10GB+. Anyone have any suggestions or can you point me to a website with suggestions on ways to slim down the image size.
My concern is that when imaging over the network via multicasting that it is going to take ages and tank our network.
Any advice is appreciated.
Thanks,
Mike
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From my testing a plain windows 7 install with no software and max compression works out to about 7GB using the latest FOG. So short of removing some system files I don’t think you can slim it down much
Did you use single partition/disk for the image type? You can also try shrinking the partition manually so it takes as little space as possible, but then you will need to deploy and resize after each deployment, see this post for info:
[url]http://fogproject.org/forum/threads/extend-your-disk-partition-to-max.3640/[/url]As for removing the unwanted system files, here is a decent guide that should give you some ideas(Every MB counts):
[url]http://lifehacker.com/374376/trim-down-windows-to-the-bare-essentials[/url] -
Travis,
Thanks for the quick response. I checked out nLite this morning and looks like it only supports XP and Vista. I did a google search using some of the terminology from the Lifehacker article and came across this program that looks like it may do what I need:
[url]http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/145343-slipstream-windows-7-sp1-into-installation-dvd-iso-file.html[/url]To answer your question, we do use single partition (Resizeable). I’ll check out your article on manually shrinking the partition as that would seem to aid my cause as well.
Once again, thanks for the useful info. Cheers!
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No problem, glad I could help out
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are you on gigabit networking? 10gb+ transfers quite quickly. I’ve got machines with windows 7 that are up and running in less than 10 minutes with quite a bit of software installed.
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Same here.
Our images have, Microsoft Office, Chrome, Firefox, Audacity, Flash, Java, Sketchup, UltraVNC, FOG Service, Drivers for the system components, etc… Our smallest image is about 25GB. Our largest image is about 40GB. Our imaging time’s average around 10-15 minutes including rename/join to domain.
I do have my own steps and scripts to help when minimizing the unnecessary bits and will happily provide it tomorrow. I don’t think, however, it will reduce it by the amount’s you’re thinking.
A base install of a system with no extra components, that’s activated is around 10 - 12 GB. If you happen to catch it right after a “fresh install” before the first boot, you can see it at around 7-9gb. However, that would not have any software you may need.
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Our SOE has no software installed except FOG and a few basic things, but with driver packs it totals about 13GB. Even over 100meg link this is still pretty fast. 1Gigabit link it flies along. We install all software after the machine has been imaged via SFX’s.
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Hi,
the same with me : nearly 8-9 Gb for windows 7.When my older network was in 100M, reinstalling a machine took 40 min, but now i migrated all into gigabit and the file copy lasts 15 min …
