Windows 7 slim install

[gothamhunter]

My wife has a not-so-powerful laptop, which is fine for her since she mainly uses it for word processing, Internet access, and so on. However, sometimes the computer seems to randomly bog down on her and I think part of it is the OS overhead. I'm considering doing a reinstall.

Has anyone done a custom Win7 install that slims down the install size and the components? If so, do you have any recommendations?

 

[Matt1970]

You can try Starter. Do you have atleast 2 gigs of ram?

 

[ViRGE]

This topic comes around twice a year. And purely IMHO here, but there's nothing of substance to strip down from Windows 7. The stuff that matters is the stuff inexorably linked to the kernel and the basic software userland, and everything else is simultaneously too trivial to make an impact and yet removing it causes more trouble than it solves.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2237781

 

[Nothinman]

My wife has a not-so-powerful laptop, which is fine for her since she mainly uses it for word processing, Internet access, and so on. However, sometimes the computer seems to randomly bog down on her and I think part of it is the OS overhead. I'm considering doing a reinstall.

Has anyone done a custom Win7 install that slims down the install size and the components? If so, do you have any recommendations?

No, installing Win7 without major components with something like vLite (or whatever it's called now) may reduce the disk space required but it almost always breaks something down the road and shouldn't have any appreciable effect on performance.

If the computer can't run Win7 for just Word and web browsing it's not just fine for her. But you didn't mention any of the hardware in it so we're stuck just speculating.

 

[Snoop]

Install 7:
-turn off all the Aero, turn off animations/transparency, go to a base desktop with no background just a color
-Turn off indexing
-Turn off system restore (Not sure how much that is going to help)
-Make sure no extraneous services are running
-Don't install anything unless absolutely necessary
-Add ram to the computer if possible
-Defrag
-Use Chrome for browsing, I cannot empirically verify this but I have a little under powered Netbook and Chrome runs much better than IE on it. Adding ram made a huge difference on this machine.

Depending on what she needs to do, If its just web browsing, you could also try an Linux Distro. I would research but some of them require very little resources. Linux Mint may work?

 

[lxskllr]

Linux Mint may work?

Mint's a little heavy, but it depends on the machine specs. GNU/Linux would be perfect for the OPs use scenario, and would maximize the hardware available.

 

[kleinkinstein]

Slipstream the install. Carve out all the crap with Black Viper. Use either 7lite or my favorite WinToolKit.