Harry Muscle
2008-07-17, 23:55
I thought I'd document my attempts and procedure at turning my laptop into a dedicated XBMC for Windows machine. That means that the machine will do nothing but run XBMC. So the whole point is to customize everything so it runs it as quickly and smoothly as possible. Also since Windows is virus prone I want to reduce virus risks without actually running an anti virus that eats up resources on the machine.
Step one was to get a distribution of Windows that's not full of unneeded stuff. First I looked at Windows PE, then BartPE, but I ruled both out cause Windows PE doesn't support OpenGL, and even though BartPE does, I couldn't get video drivers for my video card to work on it properly. My search next led me to TinyXP, which is a very small distribution of XP created using nLite. The legallity is questionable since TinyXP is distributed as an installation CD with CD Key preentered, however, as long as one has a spare valid XP license and possibly uses a program to change the CD Key that windows runs with, it would become fully legal from what I understand. However, TinyXP still had some stuff that I didn't really need.
I finally came across MicroXP ... fully installed it's about 200MB, the installation CD is only 100MB ... that's tiny. It's based on the same idea as TinyXP and done by the same author, however, it just a way slimmer version of TinyXP. Boots up in seconds (15 seconds on my machine and that includes the BIOS screen, etc.). So I had my XP version of choice. Btw, the latest version of MicroXP that's available is 0.82 by eXperience ... again, make sure you have a spare license for XP and change the serial after you install it (you can't enter a serial during installation) to make things fully legal, etc.
Next step is to install any missing drivers. MicroXP is so tiny it's missing quite a few drivers, but that's the price to pay for speed and small size. You'll need to have a normal XP CD handy cause it doesn't even have the USB Key drivers (it will ask for the Microsoft Windows XP CD to install the drivers when you insert a USB Key). Depending on which drivers you need the process will be different, but the simplest way is to download all the missing drivers on another machine, burn them to CD or place them on a USB Key and then from Device Manager install them manually ... not too difficult.
Obviously the next step is to install XBMC.
Once that's done I changed the Windows shell to no longer be explorer.exe but to point to a batch file that starts XBMC.
My next to do items are:
Figure out some way to shutdown or reboot the machine when XBMC exists (depending wether the user selected Shutdown or Reboot).
And to deal with viruses I have come across some information about how to get EWF (enhanced write filter) to work for Windows XP. What this basically does is not allow anything to be written to your system partition but instead writes it to RAM ... so as soon as you reboot any changes made are gone ... that means though that XBMC will need to be installed to a seperate partiton so it's changes are permanent, but this way you protect the system partition from any virus infection, etc. since you can't write to it ... it only pretends to write to it and as soon as you reboot all the changes are gone.
And somewhere along the way I also need to get my Xbox remote control to work.
I'll try to post more info as I figure more of this stuff out, but in the end I'm hoping to have a machine that boots in seconds, does nothing but run XBMC, and can't easily be infected by a virus.
Thanks,
Harry
Step one was to get a distribution of Windows that's not full of unneeded stuff. First I looked at Windows PE, then BartPE, but I ruled both out cause Windows PE doesn't support OpenGL, and even though BartPE does, I couldn't get video drivers for my video card to work on it properly. My search next led me to TinyXP, which is a very small distribution of XP created using nLite. The legallity is questionable since TinyXP is distributed as an installation CD with CD Key preentered, however, as long as one has a spare valid XP license and possibly uses a program to change the CD Key that windows runs with, it would become fully legal from what I understand. However, TinyXP still had some stuff that I didn't really need.
I finally came across MicroXP ... fully installed it's about 200MB, the installation CD is only 100MB ... that's tiny. It's based on the same idea as TinyXP and done by the same author, however, it just a way slimmer version of TinyXP. Boots up in seconds (15 seconds on my machine and that includes the BIOS screen, etc.). So I had my XP version of choice. Btw, the latest version of MicroXP that's available is 0.82 by eXperience ... again, make sure you have a spare license for XP and change the serial after you install it (you can't enter a serial during installation) to make things fully legal, etc.
Next step is to install any missing drivers. MicroXP is so tiny it's missing quite a few drivers, but that's the price to pay for speed and small size. You'll need to have a normal XP CD handy cause it doesn't even have the USB Key drivers (it will ask for the Microsoft Windows XP CD to install the drivers when you insert a USB Key). Depending on which drivers you need the process will be different, but the simplest way is to download all the missing drivers on another machine, burn them to CD or place them on a USB Key and then from Device Manager install them manually ... not too difficult.
Obviously the next step is to install XBMC.
Once that's done I changed the Windows shell to no longer be explorer.exe but to point to a batch file that starts XBMC.
My next to do items are:
Figure out some way to shutdown or reboot the machine when XBMC exists (depending wether the user selected Shutdown or Reboot).
And to deal with viruses I have come across some information about how to get EWF (enhanced write filter) to work for Windows XP. What this basically does is not allow anything to be written to your system partition but instead writes it to RAM ... so as soon as you reboot any changes made are gone ... that means though that XBMC will need to be installed to a seperate partiton so it's changes are permanent, but this way you protect the system partition from any virus infection, etc. since you can't write to it ... it only pretends to write to it and as soon as you reboot all the changes are gone.
And somewhere along the way I also need to get my Xbox remote control to work.
I'll try to post more info as I figure more of this stuff out, but in the end I'm hoping to have a machine that boots in seconds, does nothing but run XBMC, and can't easily be infected by a virus.
Thanks,
Harry