SP2 is bigger than SP1

[Mark K Vallevand]

SP2 images are bigger than SP1 images by about 5% to 10%.

I was hoping that bigger sizes in SP2 would be offset by some better
componentization. But, there wasn't much of that. Some, but not enough.

Are there any component dependancies that can safely be broken? I'm still
mad that Outlook Express is required on a system without users. (IIS
requires it.) And, on a machine that will never print anything, I still
need to drag in all the local and remote printing stuff just to satisfy
Microsoft Networking. I haven't had any luck selectively disabling or
removing any of these odd components that get dragged in. Either FBA fails
or the image misbehaves.

I hope that the inevitable size increases in Longhorn embedded will be truly
offset by better componentization. I'm tired of fighting size issues.

--
Regards.
Mark K Vallevand (e-mail address removed)

Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
- Benjamin Franklin


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[Mark K Vallevand]

Follow up to my own post.

Is there a way to get a more aggressive NTFS compression?

Is there a way to tune the NTFS to get more free space?

Are there any 512mb CF devices that are really 512mb? Ours format out to
486 to 494 depending on the brand.

Any clever suggestions to reduce the footprint of XPe SP2?

--
Regards.
Mark K Vallevand (e-mail address removed)

Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
- Benjamin Franklin


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[KM]

Mark,

Is there a way to get a more aggressive NTFS compression?

Is there a way to tune the NTFS to get more free space?

Some known tips are:
- turn off the Indexing Service
- disable Last Access Time
- defragment regularly
- plan your NTFS volume cluster size

Also, do you store tons of small files (under 8K, say) on your NTFS volume?
Then your MFT (Master File Table) may run out of space before your volume's free space does.

You can try to tune this and reserve additional space for the MFT with a command like "fsutil behavior set mftzone x", where x would
be the number of times you multiply the MFT reserved zone size by (MFT space is 12.5 percent of volume space by default, IIRC).

fsutil is a part of "NTFS Management Utility" component.

Are there any 512mb CF devices that are really 512mb? Ours format out to
486 to 494 depending on the brand.

Any clever suggestions to reduce the footprint of XPe SP2?

How about deploying your current (big) image on the target, running your tests to make sure everything works as expected and then
start deleting Dlls under \system32? You delete a file, you run your tests again (maybe a reboot will be required). E.g., you check
if IIS services are still working.
As soon as you hit a misbehaviour or a hard error, you know all the Dlls you can safely remove from the target.
Then it will be just a matter of a few minutes to find out all the components which those Dlls belong to and disable the Dlls in the
component File resource sections.

 

[David D]

I put my image on CF card.
One thing I do is to compress the larger folders that will mostly be read
from.
Since a CF card disk access is the main bottleneck in disk reads, it will
actually read data faster when compressed. If it is EWF'd then I don't seem
to see much performance penalty over all.
Saves alot of space too.

David

 

[Mark K Vallevand]

Yes. We've used NTFS compression from the start. Without it, we'd have no
chance to fit. Still, we are getting close to filling our 470mb partition
on the CF device. We've found that we need about 15% free space for things
to work normally. Less than that and we see funny things.

And our latest headache with SP2... IIS is using alternate file streams
with ASP.NET web pages and eating 100mb of space on the disk. AFSs are
horrible, nasty things because you can't see the space they use with file
explorer or any other tool.

--
Regards.
Mark K Vallevand (e-mail address removed)

Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
- Benjamin Franklin


THIS COMMUNICATION MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL AND/OR OTHERWISE PROPRIETARY
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[Kesavan]

Hi,

Just a quick one.Outlook Express and IIS I know are tightly couples.I
really cursed during my making of Custom Image when I really wanted
IIS but for sure not Outlook Express.I would really think of having
them biforcated because both of them does take large size.

Kesavan