Last month danielcarlhaffner opened a really interesting post about his strange Windows XP MCE installation.
There oasiz suggested to try installing Windows removing the CD when it's beginning the "network installation" or something like that and see if result is the same.

I found this really cool so I tried by myself right then on a virtual machine... it worked well but, you know, I couldn't tell if it was suitable for daily use, I had to try on bare metal...
So these days I got some time to do that, and i'm gonna tell you how it goes.

Removing the CD when the networking stuff is gonna be installed causes the copy of a lot of files being skipped and prevents the enabling of most of the services (even if related components are properly installed).
Anyway what you get is a working copy of Windows, and unlike the danielcarlhaffner's one still needs to be activated.
I must say it's very lightweight (constantly under 60MB RAM consumption in idle), but also quite crippled.
A lot of the common Windows utilities are missing.
I got to install them by the installation CD, however I still didn't get Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player.
Online Help still doesn't work...

Network connections service was disabled and even manually starting it Windows still didn't recognize my Ethernet interface.
Once installed the onboard NIC driver from motherboard's CD i finally connected to the Internet.
Actually I also got to manually start DHCP and DNS client services, which were enabled but not started yet.
Anyway I discovered that some services even when configured for automatic start-up, still need to be manually started: not only, as said before, network services, but also, for example, the Windows Installer service; I also noticed that sometimes they suddenly die and need to be restarted.
It's important to say that installing Realtek audio and Nvidia graphics driver was enough to raise idle memory consumption to about 90/100 MB: still good, but not exciting as the fresh install.

So: the trick definitely works, but the need for manually start of some services is a real issue...
It's unacceptable to open the Microsoft Management Console everytime i wanna connect to the Internet or install some program that depends on Windows Installer.
Maybe there's a way to get it working, but I must say I didn't play too much seeking a solution...

I installed only a few applications / games and most of them work, apart of the Samsung Kies for my Galaxy phone: apparently it doesn't recognize the device (but I think drivers are properly installed, 'cause the Galaxy is working at least as a mass storage).
Test Drive Unlimited instead refused to install, I guess it's a Windows Installer service related issue.

By the way I'm running this on my Core2Duo with 4 gigs, so it's hard to say how much it's faster than standard install...
If I had more time I'd try it on my old Celeron 2.4 768M...
I'm also pretty sure that a little bit of fine tuning or use of proper tools such as nLite can do the job too (maybe even better), so this is just for fun.

I'd be glad to answer any question or read your experience on this...



It feels so... clean!


Just 13 processes running... quite good, as i'm not superstitious...


It takes 58 megs to do nothing.


Starting the Themes services is all you need in order to get the Luna theme.


Visual Studio 2010 runs pretty well there.

Set to Automatic before starting.

well, i've already tried that and it doesn't work.
anyway, putting the right sc start commands into a batch file to be started at login is an option, but as it's just a workaround i don't like it at all...
probably they depend on some service that's not enabled for automatic startup, just i really don't know which...

Seems very similar to my installation. I ran into the same problem you are having. I never found a way to fully fix the problem, I never use that computer on a Network anyway, so it was no big deal. Also it is interesting to see than when doing nothing I used 10 MB less than your installation did when doing nothing.
Very nice post. I intend to use nLite sometime to replicate something similar to my installation. Would finally make XP usefull although you can't beat Windows 7.

Probably for some reason your install procedure skipped the same files (more or less) and configuration processes...
Of course Windows 7 is unbeatable, especially on a modern PC like this Core2Duo...
Indeed I think I won't activate this install of Windows, I had fun with this experiment but even if I don't use Windows as a main OS I need something more functional on my Windows partition...
This could be instead an idea for my older PCs...

It would definetly for use full on old PCs.

If you are using an old computer and doing NT5x why not just use nlite (yeah I know "I can haz custom windoze") But seriously that tool at least tries to do things in a pseudo-proper way rather than an intentional corruption of the install routine by removing the media at a particular stage.

Just seems like a nifty quirk but nothing more.

I would not recommend this type of corruption nor would I recommend nlite unless you know what you are doing.

Remember: You should never try and modify system settings blah blah blah

Peace!

Hey, i agree with you.
I just learned something cool here on BetaArchive and I thought it would be nice to share some of my experience about that in return.
You know, i'd never have thought that an apparently dangerous operation like CD removal during OS installation could instead have some interesting side effects like those.
I had fun getting it to work and solving some of the problems i encountered.
I also wrote in the open post that nLite (but even the fine tuning of services) would be a better option for SERIOUS light installs... and anyway whoever reads my post will figure I WON'T recommend him to do that because of my issues, maybe I should have tagged it as "don't try this at home".
But I thought it was an interesting fact afterall and I can remember danielcarlhaffner asked me about my experience with this stuff on his post.
Peace!

Great find! I've got an old Toshiba Satellite 2540CDS with a busted CD-ROM drive (can't read burnt discs) and a legit XP SP1 disk, so this would work wonders. It'd be interesting to see how much stuff won't work, or how much you could put back in. Have you tried installing some of the missing components (IE, WMP, Windows Installer) with the packages from the Microsoft site?

Speaking for me, I've installed Windows Media Player 9 from the internet, didn't try IE 'cause I like Firefox more, and there's still a bunch of components I'm missing, mainly system utilities like System Restore or the graphical Defragmentation utility...
Windows Installer worked well for me except for Test Drive Unlimited, among others I've succesfully installed Virtual PC 2007 and Visual Studio 2010; anyway Windows Installer has been updated during Visual Studio installation.
In my opinion almost everything can put back in (on this kind of install), but you may have to fix service issues.

With your busted drive you're gonna risk way more than me, even completing the install procedure would be a great result!
Ending up with something working would be so funny, let us know if you succeed.

Nothing beats FLP, or if you're feeling adventurous, an XPe build in that scenario.

hounsell is very adventurous!

Yus. I have tried WinFLP. It works nicely, no hassle at all.

Cool. I would try but I do not have a old machine...