Deployment Solution

Has anyone else registered the big difference between the size of the image on windows 7 vs windows xp?

Working with XP my image was around 2 gb. Now my windows 7 image is around 7 gb.

Has anyone any tips and tricks how to get the windows 7 any smaller?

Usually I removed the pagefile and the hiberfil file to help some but its still huge. I think I got my 32 bit at around 3GB but we dont install any software into our images. 

Every rendition is larger.  You could also pull out several bonus features that make it look cool and shrink the size.  Consider pulling out the visual effects from business systems and games.  You'll probably get more productivity anyway.

My 2 cents.

Hi GTDendo.

If you're using Ghost as the imaging engine in DS 6.9, you can add the -Zn switch to increase the degree to which the image is compressed. -Z1 is low compression, -Z9 is the highest level of compression.

Just to add some info, our base W7 64 bit is almost 10 gigs, and that is without any software installed.

My base image for Win 7, x64, Enterprise is just over 4GB.  Removing page files, hibernat files, and disabling system restore points will help.  Also, make sure to clean out any temp folders.

After having played around with diffrent solutions I finally removed pagefil, hiberante and system restore as bhawver also suggested. My windows 7 enterpris 64bit image file is now 4,4 gb without any compresssion.

The only thing I observe now is that sysprep will not "enable" or set the pagefile when windows starts up.

I belive this is a difference between xp and windows 7. When I did the same thing in windows xp the pagefile was set automatically for windows.

Has anyone played around with settting pagfile with sysprep or gpo?