Running bots using minimal resources (Part 2 of 6)

Hello, on these series I will help you on how to setup a bot or multiple bots.My main focus will be not on how to configure and install everything, but on how to save as much memory and resources helping bot users with slower computers to experience a performance boost.

part 1  Virtual Machines
part 2  Operative System
part 3  Operative system Tweaks
part 4  Required software
part 5  Keeping resources to a minimum
part 6  Hardware recommendations and Conclusion

Part 2: Operative System

This is possibly the most important step in the whole guide.  I started by picking Windows XP, since this was the easiest to shrink in size and required memory to run while being reliable, but other versions will work just as well. I've copied the whole CD into a folder which i would edit after. After that i downloaded and installed a software called "nLite", which was designed to remove/add programs from/to the windows installation and tweak various options prior to installation (from folder options, services you might want to remove, etc).

If you're creating a version of Microsoft Windows for your main machine, that will be harder to tell you what you should remove, because that would depend of what you use or not (wireless connection?firewire?printers? etc) but for a bot its pretty simple. I started by removing all unnecessary programs such as: calculator, media player, media center, defrag, accessibility options, movie maker(I left only Internet Explorer); then I've procedded to remove all drivers, themes, backgrounds, all languages (apart from English) and all uncessary services (printer, smartcards, messenger, windows zero configuration, windows updates, security center, etc).

After doing all this i created a .ISO for a lightweight windows with only about 200MB (remember that you need to own a original copy of Microsoft Windows still) and installed it on the virtual machine.
This results on a very low memory usage and hard drive space on your virtual machine. On the next part I will teach you a few tweaks to reduce even more that usage to improve performance.

Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries and isn't affiliated with MTGO Library or Wizards of the Coast. nLite is a registered trademark of Dino Nuhagic  and isn't affiliated with MTGO Library or Wizards of the Coast.