Why is Windows so bloated?

[Loyal Rogue]

What's the difficulty of installing XP on a new PC? Will it have the capability of handling some of the new processors and hard ware?

I bought a top-of-the-line HP for working with video that was at a great sale price at CompUSA with the intention of changing the OS to XP.
When I tried I couldn't because there are no XP drivers for some of the components.

[gerbick]

nLite, is a serious exercise if you're trying to trim like a madman. Slipstreaming SP3 and other things are definitely useful, but I tend to stop with .NET 2.0 because 3.x seems to only add the support for XAML/Silverlight support on a machine that I'd rather not worry about that.

Some things just don't seem obvious. GameXP... you could follow Black Viper's list and be just as close to it and maintain control to pull things back up.

And then there's the outright removal of portions of the OS that aren't needed. I can't even lie... 18 hours into this and I'm no smarter... just feel like I'm a bit lucky. I still haven't crossed into the whole registry reconstruction of things that need to be dead ended... as well as other things. My installs could get even smaller. There's a lot of things that Windows uses that aren't needed.

I'd love to play with vLite next to trim down my next reinstall of Vista to something more manageable instead of still trimming down services almost a half year later.

Now... time to learn how to trim down Ubuntu's bloat in 8.04.

Lord. I remember being upset at how Win2k ran like a demon on my P3 733mhz, when XP ran like a dog. Now it's Vista running like a dog on a dual-core 3.2ghz AMD, when XP is just friggin' unbelievably fast.

[random25]

nlite is great, I use it.

I have saved countless hours using a customized xp install disc,
I no longer have to spend hours doing repetitive removal of crap from the machines i install XP on. Everything is just the way i want it after the install is done.

msfn.org has lots of good instructions and help with making your own.

[ViRGo_RK]

I bought a top-of-the-line HP for working with video that was at a great sale price at CompUSA with the intention of changing the OS to XP.
When I tried I couldn't because there are no XP drivers for some of the components.

Thats what I figured, which in a way makes sense. I'll just have to tweak the hell out of Vista when I get it I guess.