nLite - Pimping up your Windows Installation

October 01, 2005

approximately 1 minutes to read

Today, I found a great tool: nLite. I wanted to slipstream the SP2 into my Windows Installation and I was searching for a tool that would do it for me when I discovered nLite.

Requirements

You need:

A Windows CD (kinda obvious)
The Service Pack 2
All hotfixes
Drivers for your hardware, extracted on disk
A CD burner capable of burning ISOs
The .NET Framework

Process

nLite is straightforward to use - just follow the wizard. The cool stuff about it is that it allows you to add your own drivers to the CD and hotfixes. If you search the web you’ll find so-called update packages where you have 30-40 hotfixes bundled. Now, you have a clean and simple way to integrate them into your Windows CD so there is no need to install them afterwards. nLite worked out-of-the-box here and it took me maybe 30 minutes to include SP2, 30 hotfixes, my graphics cards driver, create an ISO (that’s yet another great future that is built-in) and burn it. Excellent software!