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Love this. Now someone show me how to make a nano Windows 10 installation without all the telemetry BS. Essentially the kernel only with custom explorer.exe. E

by cjdell 5y ago

Love this. Now someone show me how to make a nano Windows 10 installation without all the telemetry BS. Essentially the kernel only with custom explorer.exe. Experimented with modding Hyper-V Server (the free one) with some success, but too many DLLs missing and multimedia functions don't work.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
merlinscholz 5y ago
It is still Windows 10, but Windows LTSC would be a start. Works fine for daily use after you restore some small things.
exikyut 5y ago
Windows AME (https://ameliorated.info/ https://ameliorated.info/) is a bit extreme, but technically does do this
- cjdell 5y ago
  I've searched high and low for something like this. Will give this a try. Thanks
- IntelMiner 5y ago
  Holy shit they remove Windows Update? That sounds like a great way to slide into madness as software breaks or malware rears its head
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Eh, honestly I usually have Windows Update disabled anyway because it causes much more headache than it is worth. Occasionally, once a year at most, I re-enable and update and it has about a 50/50 chance of not making me wish I'd just reinstalled instead.
    - IntelMiner 5y ago
      That sounds decidedly self-inflicted. Windows 10 (minus its LTSC variants) are designed for a much quicker update cycle. "jumping" from versions literally a year apart sounds like a great way to break things
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        From experience, updating constantly is a pretty great way to break things anyway. This way at least I am able to keep my system stable and working the way I want it to for longer, until I'm ready to deal with it potentially breaking.
      - rightbyte 5y ago
        It is usually better to chose when to risk breaking stuff then having some auto updater running.
        babypuncher 5y ago
        Windows updates that actually break things are exceptionally rare these days, and rolling them back is usually pretty easy. All my Windows environments live on the slow ring and I've not once encountered a problem caused by a bad update. Conversely, I've had Manjaro updates break my GRUB config twice in the last year, which is a pretty daunting problem to fix for 99.9% of end users. I don't expect the small team at Manjaro to do a better job of this than a trillion dollar company, I just find the reputation WU has these days puzzling. Deferring updates for extended periods of time seems to consistently cause my users far more problems than it supposedly solves.
    - babypuncher 5y ago
      I only ever have trouble with Windows Update on machines that go months or years without updates. The last two major feature updates installed in minutes like an every day bug fix or security patch.
  - exikyut 5y ago
    Yeah that was kinda the part where I went "....ooookay I don't know how practical this is for me, but... uhh... bookmarks anyway"
kunagi7 5y ago
Maybe you could try by modifying WinPE images [0]. They're quite lightweight. WinPE has been around since Windows XP and it's updated regularly. The last version matches with Windows 11 incoming release. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Enviro...
- stragies 5y ago
  Projects that build upon WindowsPE have existed since Win2k, several of those can be found on github, some updated over the years to use newer base images. But I always wondered about the legality of using that approach to create a windows Image you could boot of a USB stick, or even a Boot-image server over network. Afaik, WinPE is the engine under the installation system in older version, and can only be legally used in workflows peripheral to System installation/debug/repair. Windows Embedded seems to be the MS-preferred approach these days if you need a custom-purpose Windows installation. How to get/use Windows Embedded legally without an Enterprise agreement has be on my "look-into-it-some-day"-list, but since I don't have/use Windows-only tools in my daily workflows, the urgency has been somewhat steadily decreasing.
- ulzeraj 5y ago
  WinPE is super convenient. I've used to build Linux USB installers for PoS systems. Some of these systems used some kind of flashable custom keyboard that most of the time had to be programmed in place and the proprietary software ran on Windows. I've build a 100MB-ish image containing the current version of WinPE and the program along with its library dependencies. I think I had to download some kind of special blob to that Syslinux could load it into memory. I also remember booting a small WinPE ISO into the server virtual ISO ILO function to repair remote Windows servers on remote retail stores. Pretty much all the disk related stuff is included. That particular ISO had the proprietary drivers for the server raid controllers. Anyway very good stuff if you only need to run some old style software that doesn't require multitasking.
rzzzt 5y ago
I wanted to create a similar "from scratch" installation by adding the bootloader and the kernel to a virtual disk image, then connecting the kernel-mode debugger from the Driver Kit to a virtual machine COM port, and checking what files the kernel expects to see before it falls over (as it doesn't find them). My end goal would have been to add MSYS2 and launch an init system and ultimately a terminal. Unfortunately there were a lot of steps before the system gets to a usable state, I don't think I was anywhere near that point even after a whole lot of reboots & debug sessions. The summary in this Wikipedia article about the startup process helped a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_startup_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_startup_process
yyyk 5y ago
Tiny 10 took this to extremes - the latest version can fit on a CD-R. It probably contains less than you want, but it's an interesting exercise on how to reduce Win 10 size: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jp67cmrbKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jp67cmrbKw

by cjdell 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

merlinscholz 5y ago

It is still Windows 10, but Windows LTSC would be a start. Works fine for daily use after you restore some small things.

exikyut 5y ago

Windows AME (https://ameliorated.info/ https://ameliorated.info/) is a bit extreme, but technically does do this

cjdell 5y ago
I've searched high and low for something like this. Will give this a try. Thanks
IntelMiner 5y ago
Holy shit they remove Windows Update? That sounds like a great way to slide into madness as software breaks or malware rears its head
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Eh, honestly I usually have Windows Update disabled anyway because it causes much more headache than it is worth. Occasionally, once a year at most, I re-enable and update and it has about a 50/50 chance of not making me wish I'd just reinstalled instead.
  - IntelMiner 5y ago
    That sounds decidedly self-inflicted. Windows 10 (minus its LTSC variants) are designed for a much quicker update cycle. "jumping" from versions literally a year apart sounds like a great way to break things
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      From experience, updating constantly is a pretty great way to break things anyway. This way at least I am able to keep my system stable and working the way I want it to for longer, until I'm ready to deal with it potentially breaking.
    - rightbyte 5y ago
      It is usually better to chose when to risk breaking stuff then having some auto updater running.
      - babypuncher 5y ago
        Windows updates that actually break things are exceptionally rare these days, and rolling them back is usually pretty easy. All my Windows environments live on the slow ring and I've not once encountered a problem caused by a bad update. Conversely, I've had Manjaro updates break my GRUB config twice in the last year, which is a pretty daunting problem to fix for 99.9% of end users. I don't expect the small team at Manjaro to do a better job of this than a trillion dollar company, I just find the reputation WU has these days puzzling. Deferring updates for extended periods of time seems to consistently cause my users far more problems than it supposedly solves.
  - babypuncher 5y ago
    I only ever have trouble with Windows Update on machines that go months or years without updates. The last two major feature updates installed in minutes like an every day bug fix or security patch.
- exikyut 5y ago
  Yeah that was kinda the part where I went "....ooookay I don't know how practical this is for me, but... uhh... bookmarks anyway"

kunagi7 5y ago

Maybe you could try by modifying WinPE images [0]. They're quite lightweight. WinPE has been around since Windows XP and it's updated regularly. The last version matches with Windows 11 incoming release. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Enviro...

stragies 5y ago
Projects that build upon WindowsPE have existed since Win2k, several of those can be found on github, some updated over the years to use newer base images. But I always wondered about the legality of using that approach to create a windows Image you could boot of a USB stick, or even a Boot-image server over network. Afaik, WinPE is the engine under the installation system in older version, and can only be legally used in workflows peripheral to System installation/debug/repair. Windows Embedded seems to be the MS-preferred approach these days if you need a custom-purpose Windows installation. How to get/use Windows Embedded legally without an Enterprise agreement has be on my "look-into-it-some-day"-list, but since I don't have/use Windows-only tools in my daily workflows, the urgency has been somewhat steadily decreasing.
ulzeraj 5y ago
WinPE is super convenient. I've used to build Linux USB installers for PoS systems. Some of these systems used some kind of flashable custom keyboard that most of the time had to be programmed in place and the proprietary software ran on Windows. I've build a 100MB-ish image containing the current version of WinPE and the program along with its library dependencies. I think I had to download some kind of special blob to that Syslinux could load it into memory. I also remember booting a small WinPE ISO into the server virtual ISO ILO function to repair remote Windows servers on remote retail stores. Pretty much all the disk related stuff is included. That particular ISO had the proprietary drivers for the server raid controllers. Anyway very good stuff if you only need to run some old style software that doesn't require multitasking.

rzzzt 5y ago

I wanted to create a similar "from scratch" installation by adding the bootloader and the kernel to a virtual disk image, then connecting the kernel-mode debugger from the Driver Kit to a virtual machine COM port, and checking what files the kernel expects to see before it falls over (as it doesn't find them). My end goal would have been to add MSYS2 and launch an init system and ultimately a terminal. Unfortunately there were a lot of steps before the system gets to a usable state, I don't think I was anywhere near that point even after a whole lot of reboots & debug sessions. The summary in this Wikipedia article about the startup process helped a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_startup_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_startup_process

yyyk 5y ago

Tiny 10 took this to extremes - the latest version can fit on a CD-R. It probably contains less than you want, but it's an interesting exercise on how to reduce Win 10 size: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jp67cmrbKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jp67cmrbKw