Hey guys, Just a general question... Does removing drivers from an iso (like with NTLite or DISM) give any sort of performance boost? Or is decreasing final install size the only benefit? I've heard that windows will start a service for each driver at boot... Which if true, is scary when we're talking about everything from holographic displays to POS barcode readers.... I hope I heard wrong! xD
In general, a driver (or software for that matter) which isn't loaded during boot doesn't hog system resources. So deleting any not used driver shouldn't influence performance. What some mobo's do is load only the necessary drivers for boot (fast and ultra fast boot) and so they improve boot speed, but it's only for boot.
What do you mean by "In general..."? Are there cases where windows' built-in unnecessary drivers do use resources?
If the device isn't there then the driver won't load. As an example, Windows would not load & initialise the LSI/Megaraid drivers if that storage device is not present. What you heard sounds like a load of bs.
Same as your bs. Why don't you fire Autoruns on your system and check Drivers section, you might find BT 3Ware AMD etc stuff there even if the hardware is not present on your device. Boot time = initialization time = when Windows is really dumb and has no idea about the hardware, so it loads all boot designated drivers (and all storage drivers must initiate at boot) indiscriminately from a list. It's the driver that detects hardware, not windows detecting hardware and supplying a driver for it. "Who came first, the chicken, or the egg?" As for "tweaking" drivers in an image, that's about as dangerous as it gets. If you don't know what you're doing, don't do it, few MB storage saved or a couple seconds at most gain in bootup time ain't worth the wasted time in making a broken image.
If that was the case that they all started then you would not get a blue screen when installing onto a different storage controller.