Windows Integration Guide - murphy78

wsim runs dism commands via answer files.
It runs them all at once, which is akin to running dism /add-package pointed at a single folder full of msu or cab files.
While it is faster to point it at a whole folder, it presents the esd recovery compression problem discussed many times here in this thread.

 

I honestly couldn't tell you which one is faster. In my experience, they have been roughly the same speed.
I don't think you'd really know the full speed difference unless you had a very high speed source and target drive.
My limited experiences with 30-50 MB/s source drives and 100ish MB/s write speed target drives pretty much max out at the write speed, considering all the file system overhead and small files involved.

If you had a really high speed usb3 source drive and a sataIII SSD target drive, you could probably paint a more accurate picture.

 

It's difficult to explain.
The problem seems to occur when servicing many different indexes in an AIO.
doing a resetbase command on the non-pending updates seems to cause a problem
integrating a lot of updates also seems to cause a problem.

What happens is boot setup will get to about 85~ percent and then give an install failure.
I've noticed it since win8.1 came out and we were able to export to esd
It doesn't happen every time. In fact, it can be either very rare or very common.

Integrating hotfixes one at a time seems to reduce or eliminate this problem.
I've had a few different ideas at how to fix the issue over the last few months, though.
Firstly, I thought that limiting boot ram helped, but I think it only reduced the likelihood a little.
So I just stopped doing that and started trying to go after the cause instead of the symptom.

If you don't experience the problem, then I'm glad for you.
It's really frustrating.

 

I have been playing with minimizing win8.1 images.
I've been trying ways of reducing the image without breaking things.

Firstly, the non-invasive methods:
Removing provisionedappxpackages
disable-feature /remove certain features

This method works, but doesn't reduce the image by much and doesn't speed up the OS at all.

So that just leaves the invasive methods that will break system files.
The two largest additions are windows recovery environment (winre.wim) and language files.
On the language files thing, Windows likes to store tons of localized files for all the various system programs regardless of the language pack you have installed.
Using winreducer you can remove both of these things and also the control panel shortcuts and files for language changing.

That being said, it doesn't speed up your system. Removing files makes more room, but since the files are never loaded in the first place, there's no performance increase.
So to improve performance, there's really only a few options.
You can disable Windows Defender and Windows Search Indexing service.
You can also disable the security center service that monitors that stuff and nags you via the taskbar.

Changing these things would improve performance, but it's nothing that you cannot do by simply disabling defender in the GUI and setting the search indexer to disable in services.msc
Again, removing the files only saves a little room, it's stopping the running files that improves performance.

So my verdict on 8.1 minimizing is that if its done, it should only be done because of space constraints. It causes way more problems than benefits gained.
Also, when you tinker around with the system settings with these methods, the superfetch has to re-calibrate itself or whatever...
I don't know exactly how to describe it. Your system is actually slower during setup after minimizing because the system is going through a hissy-fit trying to figure out what's damaged.

You can also store the acl information on the winsxs folder and then compress the files with compact.exe, but it would actually slow down your performance a little by needing to decompress the files each time they are loaded.
I'm not gonna elaborate on how to do that because it's a terrible idea and I wouldn't want people to try it.

 

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Typical scenario I do when sysprepping 8.x is create user and let it finish install
Then I install a few things like directx, netfx3, vc++ redists.
Then I run wuapp.exe and install updates and reboot and repeat the process until no longer needing any updates.
Then i run %windir%\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /audit /reboot
When in audit mode, go into control panel and delete the temp account.
Then you sysprep /oobe /shutdown using the sysprep tool that's always started when in audit mode.

Then you capture it with a config.ini that eliminates both your temporary user account directory, administrator directory, and the softwaredistribution directory.

Anyway, to run ps1 scripts, you just set execution policy to remotesigned (only runs scripts from your own system if unsigned)
Then you run the appropriate script with powershell.
Typical cmd script to do this would be like:

Code:

powershell Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
powershell %TEMP%\PSR.ps1

Obviously change the path and such to match the scripts you wish to use and run the script as admin.
Remember your pushd command because running as admin will change your current directory to system32 automatically unless pushd "%~dp0" is specified.