So I kept on using the free VMs, updating them periodically as new versions of Windows 10 were released, and wondering if there was a better way, a way to run Windows 10, for free, in a VM that doesn't eat half the space of an SSD drive that I could instead be using to store cat videos and episodes of Pushing Daisies.Īnd there is a better way. I couldn't handle the price tag of buying a Windows Server licence anyway. It's great! It's tiny! It's exactly what I want! But, it sucks for gaming and it's basically discontinued as of 2017! Technically, you could say that Nano Server is having its "scope limited" to just container applications, but that's the same thing in my book. Server Nano is just a kernel, a shell, and a remote management endpoint so you can assign it work. The best thing for a tiny Windows install is Windows Server Nano, which is a even-more-stripped-down version of Server Core that has all the UI and graphics goo removed. There's just too much "stuff" in the free VM that Microsoft offers. Some of this made reductions here and there, but these gains were relatively minor. I ran the Optimize-VHD PowerShell cmdlet. I zeroed out the freespace with an old version of SDelete (SDelete v2.0 has substantially worse performance than v1.61). I reordered the files to the front of the virtual disk with a defragmenting application. VHDX file laying around that I have to keep because it has my settings on it and is already configured the way I want it. Even if I only use one Edge testing VM, I have this big old 18+ GiB. VHDX file so I can run more than two or three of them at once. I have tried, with limited success, to shrink this. I used to use the free Windows VMs that Microsoft provides for browser testing and they're decent VMs, but they are huge. In particular, I want to set up a short-lived Windows VM that will run some software or do some legacy task, and then I tear it down and go on my merry way. We can do better.įrom time to time I want to set up a Windows VM. There are not many tutorials for "how to install a minimal version of Windows 10" and what I did find were mostly a hodge-podge of one-liners on Reddit. These guides aim to create a reduced set of binaries and features for Windows that will fit in typically a few hundred megabytes of storage. Make sure those two are in sync, auto-partition type cannot be universal between UEFI and BIOS due to different partition schemes.Įnjoy, and be careful with the wipe option.There are a number of tutorials online for installing "minimal" versions of Windows XP and Windows 7. If you get an error 0x80042565 during the initial Windows setup phase, that mostly means the auto-partition type was set to GPT (UEFI) and the setup was booted in MBR (BIOS) mode, or vice-versa. Of course people who requested such a feature will welcome it, as it speeds up deployment.Ī lot of work went into the implementation, to be simple as a few clicks to setup while magic happens in the background, so it is for licensed users only. Let me highlight it again, these options can erase your disk by simply booting the image if you set it up to do so. It goes without saying, be very careful using this feature.ĭepending on what you select, it can wipe your disk clean, create and format partitions, and install Windows to a partition without user interaction. In the latest build, new feature has been added to the Unattended page, the ‘Disk partition configuration’.
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