The installation discs for Windows 10 provided by Microsoft packs all the components for all kinds of computers. But we do not really use all the components all the time. In fact, the first thing some of us do is remove or disable some of the things. For example, I install Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox browser as soon as Windows installation is finished.
With the help of an ingenious tool called NTLite we can prepare an installation media that contains only the components that we actually use. By removing the unnecessary components we can make the installation media size smaller in addition to making the installation process faster.
Here are quick steps to create a customized Windows 10 installation ISO using NTLite:
- First of all download a fresh copy of Windows 10 ISO.
- Install 7-Zip on your system. Right-click on the downloaded ISO and select 7-Zip → Extract Here.
- Install NTLite on your system. Launch NTLite, select Add → Image Directory and choose the folder where we extracted ISO in the last step.
- Expand the loaded ISO. Right-Click on the edition of Windows 10 that you want such as “Windows 10 Pro” and select Load. It is going to take some time, you can sit back and enjoy your coffee.
- Once it has been loaded, you can go through various sections and choose the components to be removed. Similarly, you can configure features, settings and, services etc. You can also integrate registry entries, updates or drivers. Once you are finished, click on Apply on the right-side.
- Now you can click on the Create ISO button in the toolbar to create the customized ISO and save it somewhere on your hard drive.
We can use tools like Rufus to create a bootable USB flash drive using this ISO file for installing Windows 10 on any PC. If you have removed a lot of components, then it will have a size as small as 1 GB. If you remove some important components from Windows, then it may have an unexpected problem.