virtualbox.org

I just read about this in a forum somewhere and had to check it out.

A stripped down Windows XP with no IE and just made for gaming. ISOs are all over the torrent sites and this thing is amazing. 15 second bootup times and it restarts in less than 45 seconds out of the box. Requires minimal RAM and HD and just flat works. It is based on the BartPE, I think.

I gave my VM 800 MB of RAM and a 3GB HD and it runs like a bat out of hell!

nunjabusiness wrote:I just read about this in a forum somewhere and had to check it out.

A stripped down Windows XP with no IE and just made for gaming. ISOs are all over the torrent sites and this thing is amazing. 15 second bootup times and it restarts in less than 45 seconds out of the box. Requires minimal RAM and HD and just flat works. It is based on the BartPE, I think.

I gave my VM 800 MB of RAM and a 3GB HD and it runs like a bat out of hell!

I actually made my own version from my XP installation CD using nLite. It's nice and fast, and great for VMs. I'm still working on getting the unattended installation to work nicely. Basically, I have given it a variety of scripts and so forth to automatically install programs like Firefox (among others), set up my desktop background, etc. Eventually, when I finish it, I'll be able to have no problem creating new machines when others crash or become too inefficient.

There's also vLite. You can force the installation system to drop the minimum RAM requirement down to 256MB. That way, you can install it on VM's with only a little bit of RAM (or old computers, like I did).