SK is newb

With Microsoft Windows, reinstallation is a given. There may hardly be a few people who have not reinstalled a copy of windows ever in their life.

And they probably have the slowest and the most bloated system ever.

Over the course of time, plenty of temporary files, settings for older softwares that you have already uninstalled, non-unregistered registry keys remain.You could spend hours in the registry manually removing all entries. Or you could format your computer and set it up afresh.

Ok, so now that you are lazy like me and have decided to format your computer. That still doesn’t solve problems. This is because, installing an Operating System hardly takes time nowadays (eg. Vista takes around 40 minutes from zero to desktop), it’s the part where you install the related softwares that takes the whole day. And don’t even get me started on Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows Update. Service Pack 1 takes over an hour to install on my system. With Windows Update also taking around 45 minutes to an hour to just install the updates.

Oh, and if you have installed other Microsoft Software like Office, then your wait gets even longer, because you need to wait for the Microsoft Office updates to install as well.

Not to mention the fact that you need to install audio/video codecs, your preferred internet browser, its extensions (if any), a download manager and the list just keeps growing.

Would it not be easy if you could have all this directly pre-installed along with your Windows Installation? Yes. Wouldn’t it be great if you could do it without any background knowledge in scripting? A loud resounding YES.

Starting from Vista, Microsoft has ditched the traditional install method in favour of a superior imaging based install (WIM). The new method is much faster(compare an hour of install for Windows XP, roughly 1.5GB to a 30-40 minute install for Vista Ultimate weighing at 9GB).

To us end users this means easier custom installs. You no longer need specific versions of application that are made for easy integration into Windows install. I might even be bold enough to say that if you don’t want to strip anything out of the default installation, you don’t need BartPE or vLite either.

Since this is going to be a somewhat detailed explanation of the method I have used, its going to be in multiple parts. In this part, we will just cover the basics of what is to be done.

First things first. We need a few software before we start on our journey of customizing our Vista install. They are:

1. VMware / VBox / VirtualPC : We use a virtual machine software so that we do not need multiple computers. And this makes it easier when a restart is in order too. I am using a copy of VMware.
2. Windows Automated Installation Kit : It is one of the key tools that is required to create our customized image.
3. Windows Vista : This is the copy of vista that you are going to install.
4. Software : This is upto your own discretion. These softwares are going to be installed onto your virtual machine.
5. Internet Connection : This is used for to run Windows Update to make your image as latest as possible, patching any security vulnerabilities on the way. I’ll assume that you have internet as you are reading this page right now.

Make sure that you have plenty of hard drive space before you begin as you are going to create more than one virtual machine. Also, hard drive space gets gobbled up pretty fast while installing applications.

Overview:

Here is a short summary of what we are going to do in order to get our customized vista image.

1. Setup a virtual machine
2. Install Vista
3. Install all the softwares and then update it using Windows Update
4. Generalize our install
5. Capture the image of the hard disk partition where it is installed

That’s it for part 1. Stay tuned for the part 2 of the procedure where we will go through a detailed step by step overview of what is to be done.