Boot into Win PE is extremly slow.

I've stopped screwin' around with any versions of W11 (or W10 for that matter), I now only use W11 LTSC IoT Enterprise 24H2 (and W10 LTSC IoT Enterprise 21H2). Because they're "clean" corporate versions, they contain none of the W11 inhibitions applied to all the other W11 versions and as such don't need any of the tricks to get by the limitations, hardware or software. The oldest Systems I have it running on are an Intel 3rd gen i7 (Ivy Bridge) from 2012 (an old HP AIO configuration belonging to my guinea pig... err, my partner) and an old i5 Ivy Bridge laptop... they work very well. I don't have any older machines other than that, at the moment.

 

Raza, my apologies. The above is incorrect. I just looked at that laptop and the OS is Win11 22H2. Not 24H2 as I posted above. I tried to upgrade to 24H2 but received the error message about the CPU not supporting...
PopCnt
SSE4.2

Too many late nights.

 

Is it easy to switch to W11 LTSC IoT Enterprise?

 

Win11 LTSC to IoT is a matter of running slmgr /ipk <generic key for W11 Iot LTSC> which changes the SKU
More info

 

@Hadron - I do not believe you can "upgrade" existing commercial versions of W10/W11 to Enterprise LTSC editions... only a clean install is available. LTSC editions are not like normal commercial editions... they are more like W07 used to be. By that I mean they build as barebone OSes... no MS Store, no OneDrive, no bloat at all, the only thing that comes with it is EDGE. You build your application environment from scratch (which is what I loved about W07). All of the missing things can be added if you want them, no issues there. Their update schedule usually runs about 18-24 months behind commercial versions. The reason is that they want to have only the most stable OS updates/upgrades available. MicroSloth unleashes updates upon commercial users, and when they blow up System features, much time is then spent trying to reverse System updates (by users) and repairing the damage done (by MicroSloth with repaired updates). Corporate editions of W10/W11 DO NOT want this hassle, they want stability... aka well tested updates/upgrades. For this reason MicroSloth keeps their updates/upgrades behind commercial releases of their OSes. Their EOL (End of Life) is also significantly longer than the commercial versions... 10-yrs vs 5-yrs, I believe.

As mentioned earlier, the W11 LTSC release does not have any of the hardware/software requirements that the commercial version do. Since they're corporate versions, they need to work with the broadest selection/ages of machines. They have no TPM requirement, MS account requirement (local users fully suipported, no network supported) and no specific processor hardware requirements (don't know how far back they do require based on my machines).

It's a very lean, clean installation. ACTIVATION is usually done through Corporate Activation Servers (not through MS as a requirement but I believe you can do this as well) and codes are hard to come by (because they're usually assigned to Corporations ).

That's about the most basic description I can come up with as far as its use is concerned...

 

What is the size of the Os when freshly installed?

 

@pb1 - on a Ryzen 7-based micro (8-core, 16-thread), 32gB RAM and 2-SSDs... fresh install size = 26.3gB (no MS updates applied). This is the 1st W11 IoT Enterprise RTM release (24H2... November 2024, I believe).

 

That was a lot for a bloatfree Os.

 

I just installed it. 28 GB used after the Microsoft Updates and a cleanup.

Edit... Now down to 14.9 GB used.

Edit... I have a Win11 24H2 with 11.2 GB used.

 

What was done at your 1st edit?

 

I do Disk Cleanup, Cleanup System Files and delete everything.

Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase

Delete everything in "C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download"

That gave me 28 GB used.

I'd forgotten to disable Hibernation...

powercfg -h off

That gave me 14.9 GB.

I usually disable Reserved Storage but it was already disabled. In a standard Windows install I gain another 7 GB of Free Space after disabling.

 

Yeah I had heard from people who have tried it that without PopCnt Windows 11 24H2 cannot boot. There are various levels of hardware incompatibilities, some PCs with older incompatible CPUs can be upgraded to Win 11 24H2 by first upgrading to an older version of Win 11. But some very old ones like the ones missing PopCnt are out of luck.

Unfortunately all this information is from second or third hands. I have only had one working PC for the last 6+ years and it is fully compatible with Windows 11 24H2, so I don't have that hands-on experience with trying to overcome Win 11 hardware incompatibility issues.

 

No compression of C:?

 

Never. It slows the OS.

 

TRF and Adric, thanks for the tutorials. You made it easy work.

 

Thank you, Frog.

 

A partition image of LTSC was created and restored to another computer. The LTSC partition on the other computer has been resized to 30 GiB to save space on the SSD. All OK.

Used space is 14351 MiB.

 

Do you all know how to activate a Windows Edition such as LTSC?
If not, google 'massgravel' and you will find the best tool. Don't use anything else.

 

That url shown in that screenshot is not what I'm talking about.

It's this one:

 

I use compact Os and also a couple of other cleaners than you, but i am not getting it smaller than you get, so, is that what you mentioned all you do?

 

I've never used that powershell method before, I use the scripts they provide. Anyway, that's a false positive. These tools activate MS products, of course we will get false positives, they are completely clean though.

I recommend you to study all the info in that website to understand what their tools can and cannot do.

 

Yes, I don't have other methods.
What is the smallest Used Space you have achieved?