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Ready to reinstall XP Pro SP3 on an 8GB netbook: What can I do to keep it small?

CZroe

CZroe

Lifer
I'm ready to give this old Acer Aspire One netbook to my niece but it is in need of a serious freshening up. I've always had the My Documents folder redirected to a 16GB class 6 SD card and had no paging or hibernation files, be I recently realized that my ~2GB install has ballooned to ~6.5GB leaving only about a single GB left for applications. I began investigating and it was mostly Windows Update uninstallation files and the $hf_mig$ folder, which I would like to keep to a minimum this time around. The problem is that most of the $hf_mig$ folder is full of files to keep track of IE7 and IE8 security patches. Because IE8 is not included in SP3, any fresh installation of XP is going to start accumulating them again before it's even ready to use. When combing through everything with a fine-toothed comb to ensure that I got all my files off, I've meticulously stripped out anything and got the install back down to about 2.5GB. I even followed guides and ran ccleaner, and manually poked through everything. I just couldn't believe that updates alone tripled my install size so I figured that there had to be some large files of mine lost somewhere on the drive, but I guess not.

I believe that I'd rather strip IE out of the next XP install completely and just set her up with Firefox Portable (to ensure that the files stay contained on the SD card), but what can I do about all the other security updates? Without another SP, is there a way to install them with the initial OS install without leaving the huge mess of files behind? I am aware of having an install automatically include and install patches and updates that you put into a certain directory on the disc, but I want to go a bit farther than that because that's no better than simply updating after installing the base OS. I don't want an installation with every modem driver known to MS on a system that doesn't have and will never have a modem, so I'm hoping there's a good recommended way to strip all that out as well.

So, what are my options?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

OH! And, FWIW, installing a 2.5" HDD isn't an option for this particular model. I modded a 1.8" HDD in there once but it died not very long after. The 8GB SSD is so slow that I have to use FAT32 (no individual FS file compression) and FlashFire (FS driver that uses sys mem as a write buffer for super-slow SSDs) just to make it remotely usable and it's already upgraded to the max sys mem (1.5GB). The SSD was never intended for a non SSD-aware OS and originally had Linpus Linus on it.
 
Personally, I'd use Linux on it. If that isn't an option, I'd carefully use Nlite. I wouldn't remove IE. That's just asking for problems down the road. Just delete all the shortcuts, and references to it, and that should be fine.
 
lxskllr said:
Personally, I'd use Linux on it. If that isn't an option, I'd carefully use Nlite. I wouldn't remove IE. That's just asking for problems down the road. Just delete all the shortcuts, and references to it, and that should be fine.
Click to expand...

Leaving IE on there means also having to keep it up to date, which leads directly to the problem I already experienced, but I know what you mean (she'll need it for Windows Update, for example). That said, IE9 won't even be made available for XP and MS didn't even include IE in SP3. 🙁 As for Linux, no, it isn't an option for her. She will be using video out, burning discs with external drives, and managing her MP3 players/libraries and she only knows how do do those things with Windows.

Is there an up-to-date installation of IE8 that has most security updates rolled into it or is the online installer still the only way to go?
 
Couldn't you install IE8, update it fully, then delete all reference to it? Any security fixes should be taken care of through Windows update, without her actually having to run IE. I know I get patches for it on my Vista box, and I never use IE.
 
CZroe said:
She will be using video out, burning discs with external drives, and managing her MP3 players/libraries and she only knows how do do those things with Windows.
Click to expand...

Depending on the MP3 player and video chipset, that stuff might all be simpler in Linux. I know I have an easier time burning discs with Nautilus in Gnome.
 
Thanks for the input, guys. I'll take it all into consideration.

lxskllr said:
Are you saying that Windows update doesn't patch IE? If so, I don't think that's correct.
Click to expand...

He's saying that you can't use WindowsUpdate.com in, say, Firefox, but the WU services still work without it so the update process no longer utilizes it.
 
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