Thread: Using minLogon to speed up booting and decrease footprint

For those of you who are looking to do this, I've done it and the results we're F***ING awesome.



nLite'd XP pro (down to 700mb) (w/Sp2)
Installed the on my laptop (newly formatted)
Installed bootvis, ran it 4 times (windows needs a few times restarted to optimize itself)
My boot times were 28-32 seconds
Installed, Minlogon
Ran BootVis

My startup times are between 16-22 seconds...


I havent optimized the drive, I haven't taken down any of the services yet or even reduced the size of Xp's foot print.

I purely just wanted to see what all this was about, it is definatly worth it. I can't wait to disable iExplore.exe and embed my GUI.

Thanks guys for the indepth instructions, everyone else planning on doing this it took me a night (2 hours to research and read up about this and 2 hours to complete it, building XP-installingXP-Re-Config using Minlogon)

I'm working on this right now too ... though I'm starting with a more stripped nLited XPSP2 image (~390MB installed). I'll do my testing in vmWare. Hopefully the combination of minLogin and EWF can give quick boots and allow me to avoid hibernation all together (Audigy NX doesn't like hibernation).

I will also be adding the Enhanced Write Feature to my custom install, will post the pains and pleasures as well.

Hi,

I just wanted to confirm one thing.

Does it work with an already activated copy of XP, i.e. not the Corporate version?

Much appreciated,

nihilist

So what other components of XP Embedded can we integrate into XP Pro to improve boot times?
So far we have EWF and minlogin... that's a great start!

Hey guys, I'm glad this is working out for you as well!!! Check my post in the EWF thread about my final install on a CF card!!

MinLogon should work on any XP install period. Regarding activation... well, you'll probably figure out, but that's as far as I'll go. I researched MinLogon soley for footprint and faster boot times.

There's a few more things I want to work on: RAM drives, no not EWF, but actual RAM drives so that the OS is loaded into your RAM and runs diskless. I don't think this would be useful for a car pc since it's going to be slow to boot up, but it should be interesting none the less. The major issue is with getting as small an XP as possible because the whole OS will reside in RAM along with any RAM the OS needs to use. Luckily nLite installs don't use much RAM to begin with and people have been getting them down in size quite a bit. This would allow for XP running off a USB key for instance. The next is researching the EWF API to see what cool things we could do with it to allow for easier updating of the drive without having to do the EWFMgr shuffle (i.e. -commitanddisable -live, -enable, reboot).

Originally Posted by egeekial

So what other components of XP Embedded can we integrate into XP Pro to improve boot times?
So far we have EWF and minlogin... that's a great start!

I would put the question different way:
what else we can delete from WindowsXP knowing what XPE components cosist of.
For example: Do you use explorer shell "My Documents" extension? No? Then delete mydocs.dll and its corresponding registry keys (I am only using search in regedit, but I am about to find out registry keys in XPE repositories to save me some time :-). Yes, its that easy :-)

After looking at the EWF API it looks like you can indeed commit a specific file, but only if the size doesn't change. If you commit even if the file increased or decreased in size you run the risk of corrupting your volume.

So how can we slipstream all this into a fresh install? Is it possible with nLite?