Creating a Smaller Virtual PC

With Microsoft making the Virtual PC free, the next hurdle is how to maybe thin down some of the infamous “bloat”

When you’re running a Virtual Machine, you don’t always need all the Windows excesses. You just want to test the program and get out. Jeff Atwood has a great tutorial at his blog Coding Horror called Creating Smaller Virtual Machines

Here is some of the hype…

I’ve become obsessed with producing the smallest possible Windows XP Virtual PC image. It’s quite a challenge, because a default XP install can eat up well over a gigabyte. Once you factor in the swapfile and other overhead, you’re generally talking about around 2-4 gigabytes for relatively simple configurations.

My best result so far, however, is a 758 megabyte virtual machine image of a clean, fully patched Windows XP install. Not bad. And here’s how I did it.

The tutorial is aimed at Microsoft Virtual PC, but it’s probably applicable to other virtualisation solutions as well.

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