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 Croatian college student has created a utility that installs a seriously stripped-down Windows Vista, saying the heft of Microsoft’s biggest desktop OS was just too big to believe. “Who can justify a 15GB operating system?” asked Dino Nuhagic, a fifth-year student from Split, a Croatian city on the Adriatic. Not Nuhagic, or the uncounted users who have turned to his creation, vLite. vLite is a free program that lets users pick and choose which Vista components, hotfixes, drivers and even language packs are installed, then builds a disk image that can be burned to a DVD for unattended installation of the operating system.

“Why did I do it? Well, it’s performance and work environment,” said Nuhagic when asked why he came up with vLite. “Performance, that’s easy to explain. The less things running, the more responsive the OS. But the environment part is where it gets down to personal preference.” Those preferences include options for leaving out virtually every component of Windows Vista, from the minor — such as the bundled screensavers — to the major, such as the firewall or Universal Plug and Play. Some vLite users, in fact, have made it a contest of sorts to come up with the puniest-possible installation package for the OS. While Microsoft recommends that users set aside 15GB of hard disk space to install its pride and joy, Nuhagic’s fans boast of squeezing it into an image file as small as 515MB that takes up just 1.4GB on the hard drive. More details and download available at vlite.net.