How to slipstream your Windows installation using nLite

Have you ever installed Windows on a new machine from scratch using the Windows OS CD and found out that after the install was complete, you had to do at least 70 plus updates from Microsoft to bring your installation up to date ? This usually takes a lot of time and effort, but its a necessary evil as you do need to patch your system for all those existing vulnerabilities. Today, we will go through the process of "SlipStreaming" a Windows installation with you. It means, that you create a new installation media (a new install CD) which has all the updates built into it, so you don't have to sit around doing updates once it has finished installing the Operating System

Slipstreaming comes in very handy if you were to install the Operating System more than once, or more than once on another machine even. Its also secure, it leaves the danger out of an un patched machine on the network, which might get infected with a virus or malware and spread. With Slipstreaming you can include hefty service packs along with any hot fixes for your operating system.

In this demo, we will slipstream a Windows XP cd using a free product called nLite. The process although might seem lengthy, but its extremely simple. nLite is a very powerful product, that lets you create custom install CDs, for example if you did not want to install Windows Media Player, MSN Messenger, MSN Explorer etc with your default Windows install, you can choose to do so by creating a custom install CD using nLite. You can create bootable CDs with tweaks and driver integration for devices that you might have.

You can start by downloading nLite from http://www.nliteos.com/download.html

Step1:

- Start nLite setup on your machine by double clicking on setup.exe, choosing English as the default language and saying Ok.

Step 2:

- Click Next to start the install wizard

Step 3:

- Accept the Licensing agreement and click next

Step 4:

- Choose default install location, click next

Step 5:

- Choose Custom installation, click next. Choose defaults till the end of installation

Step6:

- Launch nLite from Start -> All Programs -> nLite. Choose English as the language when the wizard starts, click next

Step 7:

- From your Windows installation disk, copy all the files to a folder on your hard drive. I copied them to I:\slipstreamwindows

Step 8:

- When asked to locate the Windows installation folder, point to I:\slipstreamwindows