Slimmed down windows on mac?

[Xgm541]

I posted this in the MBA forum without reply so I'm bringing it here.

I have the MBA 11 inch with only 64GB of space. I was thinking of using my windows 7 DVD on my windows laptop to "slim it down", taking out unnecessary components as to save space.

has anyone done this?

 

[Gav2k]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

There are a few guides about on how to do this. Used to do this with xp with great effect

 

[Xgm541]

This is my first mac, therefore I dont know much about bootcamp. Does the MBA 2010 model support XP? I thought it was only windows 7. If anyone has a link to a guide that worked recently for them, that'd be great. Thank you!

 

[Quad5Ny]

You only need a 20GB Boot Camp partition for Windows 7 if you; Shrink the Pagefile, Disable Hibernation & Disable System Restore.
Also keep in mind that 32-bit Windows 7 versions use less Hard Drive space than 64-bit ones (7GB vs 10GB).

How to Shrink your Pagefile (To a Minimum of 256MB and a Maximum of 3GB):

1. Open up a Administrator Command Prompt
2. TYPE - wmic computersystem where name="%computername%" set AutomaticManagedPagefile=False
3. Press Enter
4. TYPE - wmic pagefileset where name="C:\\pagefile.sys" set InitialSize=256,MaximumSize=3072
5. Press Enter
6. Restart your Computer

Note that You can also do this through the GUI, but its easier for me to just tell you 2 commands.


To Set the Pagefile back to default:

1. Open up a Administrator Command Prompt
2. TYPE - wmic computersystem where name="%computername%" set AutomaticManagedPagefile=True
3. Press Enter
4. Restart your Computer

Also please note if your Windows partition ever goes under 3GB of free space and then try's to allocate the full 3GB for the Pagefile, you'll probably get a BugCheck Bluescreen.
You can avoid this by setting InitialSize to 3072. This way you always have 3GB allocated.

How to disable Hibernation (Sleep will Still work):

1. Open up a Administrator Command Prompt
2. TYPE - powercfg hibernate off
3. Press Enter
4. TYPE - del /A "C:\hiberfil.sys"
5. Press Enter

To Re-Enable Hibernation:

1. Open up a Administrator Command Prompt
2. TYPE - powercfg hibernate on
3. Press Enter
4. Restart

Disabling Hibernation will give you back %Space% in HD storage space.
Where %Space% is == 75% of your Physical RAM
Example: If you had 4GB of RAM, you would re-gain 3GB of storage space on your Windows Partition.

How to disable System Restore in Windows 7 <-- This is a Youtube link, Click it.

It will probably do it automatically, but you might also want to click the "Delete" button to remove any old restore points.


To Re-enable System Restore: Follow the steps in the video but instead of clicking 'Turn off system protection' click "Restore system settings and previous versions of files'.


System restore takes up space that you just don't have with that small 64GB SSD (By default I think its 3ish GB or so on a 20GB Partition). If your careful you should never need it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Restore

On a MacBook Air with 2GB of RAM; You could create a 20GB Windows Partition, Install Windows 7 32-bit, Do all these steps and still have 12.75GB (on the Windows Partition) left for Programs & Personal Files.

----------------

In addition to all of this, there is Windows Thin PC (that uses even less space; only about 3GB vs 7-10GB!!!), its in the RC (Release Candidate) stage right now. You can download a 180 day beta tester version by signing up on Microsoft Connect. - https://connect.microsoft.com/site1223
Windows Thin PC Review/Overview Here - AnandTech - Windows Thin PC: Windows, Slimmed Downhttp://www.anandtech.com/show/4281/windows-thin-pc-windows-slimmed-downhttp://www.anandtech.com/show/4281/windows-thin-pc-windows-slimmed-down