[webazoid]

I just ordered a dell mini w/ 8 gb ssd, 512 mb ram, and xp home. How many gb's does this setup fill when I first boot up the laptop? How much hd space can i recover by deleting unneeded programs vs by doing a clean install w/ nlite?

[1esproc]

About 3.8gb on first boot. Don't know about clean install.

[quickv8s10]

i just did a reinstall with are the junk back on it and the hard drive not compressed it about 5.1g's with system restore on. buy Just the basic windows and just drives to run your suff is about 3g's

[JekyllInside]

Originally Posted by webazoid

I just ordered a dell mini w/ 8 gb ssd, 512 mb ram, and xp home. How many gb's does this setup fill when I first boot up the laptop? How much hd space can i recover by deleting unneeded programs vs by doing a clean install w/ nlite?

Do a favor yourself and try a clean install, you will appraise the improvements in speed, stability and free space available.

You can also check this post:

http://mydellmini.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=1474

JekyllInside
-----------------
Mini 9 Black (Webcam, Bluetooh, 8GB SSD) + 2GB Corsair RAM + 16GB SDHC Kingston + Samsung SE-S084B + Dell Bluetooh Mini Mouse

[webazoid]

For those interested, the orignal uncompressed size of xp upon booting was 3.58 gb with 40 processes loaded.

Removed:
broser address error redirector
dell box.net launcher
dell support center
dell video chat
google desktop
google toolbar for IE
GoToAssist
mcafee
search assist
ms works

Cleared recycle bin, roobooted.

used 2.91 gb (7.1 total)

Used Startup control panel to unselect everything.

Now when I boot up, load only 20 processes.

[webazoid]

my desktop/task manager.

[MoInSTL]

webazoid,

Good Info. Did you run a registry cleaner after removing? I don't know if defragging the registry helps but I ran it after I removed all but Google Toolbar.

Currently bidding on a drive so I can do a clean install.

[twiceover]

My Dell Mini 9 8gb is on its way so I have been reading through the forum. Just wanted to touch base on this topic. If you do a little work with nLite you can get a WinXP Home install down to just under 800mb. I have done this on my wife's eee701 2g surf which has only 2gb of SSD space and 512mb ram.

On her eee after nLite XP Home, OpenOffice, FoxIt, Pidgin, EphPod, AVG, VLC, and some other minor apps, she is using ~1.2gb of space. Gotta remember to turn off the page file, which even with only 512mb of ram XP runs great. With this she sees ~31 second bootup from button press to wireless connected and all processes settled.

Kinda sad, going by the system requirements, Installing MS Office 2003 is actually lighter than OpenOffice 3. I'll probably go with this on my Mini when it arrives and try to slim it down further.

[twiceover]

Just wanted to post an update to my above post. Just got my mini 9 8gb today. After nearly everything I wanted to install I am using 980mb of disk space with careful installation of the following:

XP Home nLite SP3
Drivers
Office 2003 Basic (Word, Excel, Outlook)
FoxIt
FireFox3
Pidgin
Bullzip PDF Printer
Alzip
RocketDock
Virtual CD (ISO Mounting)
Royale Theme Pack

There's still some other things to install, but mostly done. Currently have 6.19gb free on the 8gb SSD (7.14gb usable). No page file, no hibernation and the thing works fine off 512mb Ram. Can't wait till my 2gb stick arrives.

Just an FYI

[TD99]

I've spent the past few days tinkering with various options in nLite. I was able to get the Win XP Home install (using the CD supplied from Dell as a starting point to create the custom ISO) down to about 650MB of space used. The ISO itself was just 201MB.

I'm still experimenting, but the only problem I had was getting the Webcam to work (the driver would throw an error during installation). I just talked to another engineer about this and I think I know what it is...

I had unchecked Windows Image Acquisition during the nLite process and I recall for a fact that webcams and scanners need that. Will try it again with WIA included. If it works, then I can say that I've got XP down to under 700MB of space used. My goal is to have Win XP Home SP-3, all the latest Windows Updates, IE7, FireFox, and AVG Free or Norton Internet Security 2009 all taking up 1GB of space or less.

Stay tuned.

I should add that right out of the box, I only had about 700MB free on the 8GB SSD!