XPlite Review

by Eric Vaughan

February 03, 2004

What is XPlite?

A program that will allow you to uninstall parts of XP that do not show up in the Ad/Remove section in Control Panel (what XP should have done from the beginning).

The XPlite website is http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html .

I did some research on XPlite when it went gold and was intrigued by it. It's predecessor (98lite) was renowned for the ability to strip a system down to conserve, what was then, valuable disk space. With the proliferation of large hard drives, space is no longer an issue for many of us. The exception to that is laptops. If you're anything like me you never have enough space on that.

Why the review then?

XP installs way too much stuff for many of us. You've heard the cries of the flame warriors in the forums and message boards, "bloatware, bloatware!" Well, one mans bloat is another mans feature (or so Apple tells us ). However these flame warriors do have a point, we should be able to remove the parts we don't want. Actually, we should be given that option at install time, but, I digress. Removing unneeded/unwanted portions of XP has 3 obvious advantages; Security, less used hard drive space, and control.

I'll be looking at XPlite to see:

1 - Does it deliver as advertised?

2 - Does uninstalling components with XPlite cause problems?

3 - What do you gain by using XPlite?

A closer look

I cleaned my drive and ran speed disk. Then I made a Ghost image and prepared to run the program (that was a hint!). You do not need to install XPlite, it is an executable (.exe) that will run from any drive/partition. Excellent!

(intro screen)

You'll open the application and the click "Next". This takes you to the WFP (Windows File Protection) box. In order to make many of the changes, disabling this is necessary. You'll do so and reboot to the following screen and click "Next" again. Let me stress something now, DO NOT FORGET to turn WFP back on!

Here you'll find all your options, there are plenty (and more to come if the beta version is any indication). Before I continue let me hand out some advice before I get emails from people whining at me. DO NOT uninstall stuff you know nothing about, you'll be sorry. What you choose to get rid of will depend on personal preferences and needs. Rather than list every one for you, here is a screen shot of the whole thing.

Using XPlite

Everything is pretty straight forward. I choose what options I wanted to uninstall and clicked "Next". I'm not exactly sure why but I was asked for my XP CD during the process, no biggie. I rebooted and then turned WFP back on. I then rebooted into safe mode and cleaned the drive again, rebooted and ran Norton Speed Disk. Checking the error logs, no errors have happened as a result of using XPlite (even after 2 days of use).

From the components I choose to remove, I gained approximately 230MB of hard drive space. The makers of the program state that it is possible to make XP itself take up under 350MB if you completely strip it down. Thats more shrinkage than a swim in a cold pool while viewing nudie pictures of Oprah can produce!

Now, I had a theory that stripping some of the "features" from XP would make it faster. However, I ran into 2 problems in trying to prove this theory. The first problem is that all my systems are pretty well tweaked. Yes, I could have set up a test system and done 2 full installs but that leaves me with the second problem. The second problem is that I'm at a loss as to what benchmark I could use to produce reliable results in benchmarking the OS against the changes made. I actually did make an attempt at using PCMark04. It should be noted that this situation is completely outside of what it's designed to measure (which is why I won't publish the scores) but I thought I would give it a shot. The results were statistically insignificant.

Conclusion

Now  to answer the previous questions:

1 - Does it deliver as advertised?

Absolutely.

2 - Does uninstalling components with XPlite cause problems?

After 2 days of use I encountered no problems.

3 - What do you gain by using XPlite?

Security, hard drive space, and control.

Negatives

While the menu does offer a small explanation of what each Windows "feature" is, it is rather limited. I would like to see a more detailed explanation of the "feature" and possible problems with uninstalling that "feature". They do have a small database of problems up, but I would like to see more. IMHO, the best thing they could do is to get a forum/message board going where people could go for answers to problems and advice.

Positives

Does what it claims to do. Add to that the fact that upgrades are free and you have a winner.

Recommendation

I stopped giving out "awards" here some time ago, I'll just tell you what I think about XPlite...

XPlite is a tweakers dream come true. A professional looking application, it delivers on the promise "Windows your way". Not only useful in the home environment, it should strongly be considered as a solution by IT folks as well. I love this program and will continue to use it. Next time you see some flame warrior whining about XP's bloat, just post a link to XPlite. In a nutshell, it simply delivers. I highly recommend XPlite.