Forgive me if this is a simple thing, but I figured asking before spending hours on something that might or might not work would be the way to go.
I run Windows 8.1 and I have all the updates stored locally. This means that when I have to re-install windows, I have to run all the updates again which take a llllooooonnnnggg time.
I know windows has an image option, but from what I read, if you have a 100Gb partition for windows, your image will be 100Gb. I feel there should be a better way.
What would be the best way to install windows, apply updates, maybe 1 or 2 other apps, change settings as required, and then to create some sort of image of that installation?
The idea here is to have a ready to go base of windows so that all I need to do is drivers, latest browsers and media players, and I’m done. My dev enviroment is already a VM and my steam library is on a separate drive as well.
Side note for those wondering why windows 8:
I have classic shell installed. With that app, I find windows 8.1 really really great. It’s been the most stable windows OS for me so far as well. I’ll move to windows 10 when I have to…
You can use DISM to slipstream updates and drivers directly into an ISO. It is a command line tool, provided with ADK(assessment and deployment kit). The basic procedure is to extract an ISO, mount a .wim file, inject drivers and/or updates, save and unmount wim, repeat with other wims, and finally create an ISO from the folder you extracted the original ISO too.
You also should be able to integrate programs or change settings, however, I have not personally used DISM for these functions. DISM documentation
There are programs available that provide a GUI wrapper for DISM. NTlite is one option and provides a fairly comprehensive feature list with the paid version. DISM GUI is an open source option.
There used to be faster pirate versions before Win10 which basically copied how it works out, anyways, with those you’d be back in action within 10mins I guess, its like 1 day faster to use that than downloading updates through updater
So, if you see some effort to that @TheCakeIsNaOH’s way, it’ll be beautiful and you dont have to hesitate just hitting formats
Bonus notes:
Now that Win10 is so fast to make happen, bottleneck is that USB stick, and it’d be faster to download shit straight through UEFI
Just few years and these probably stop selling 50/5 to fiber and it’ll be extra retarded to use cheap USB stick over 100/10
You can use phone to download & install Win10, so you could store that 8.1 to your phone and mount it as USB stick