Creating a stripped-down snapshot for booting

I would like to use IR in the same way as Peter - ie having archives on external drives and using the secondary snapshot purely for booting if necessary.
In this case the smaller size the secondary snapshot is, the less size it will take up on my main drive and the smaller my images can be.

Last time with FdISR ( on XP) I created a "Baby" snapshot just with windows and FdISR and archived it. I did this during the build of my drive. This time my drive already exists (Win 7 - 64bit) , so I need to strip back all programs that are not necessary. Is there any better way than using add/remove? Are there any additional large files that are not really necessary and can safely be deleted in order to reduce the file size?

And just another thought - could I actually use my XP Baby snapshot to update my secondary (Win 7) now? And if I managed to boot up with this old archive transferred to the current secondary, I would then have the original FdISR running. Could I use this to update a new archive onto my primary snapshot running IR? My head starts spinning

 

Assuming that you have enough free space on your drive:
Restore the XP archive to a new snapshot (call it XP, whatever).
You'll have 3 snapshots, two = W7 & one = XP.
Boot to the XP snapshot.
Restore a W7 archive to the secondary snapshot to verify that the version of FD in XP is working OK.
Boot to the secondary snapshot, again to verify that FD worked OK.
If it did, boot to the primary and delete the secondary W7 and your left with a full size W7 and a stripped down XP.

If the XP was running on different hardware then you may not be able to do this. Or it may be OK, so try it, it can't blowup anything.

Worst case, it doesn't work and you delete it and create a new secondary W7 from the primary.

 

I did it the hard and time consuming way, just started to delete all my programs and all of My Documents and My Pictures. The only programs left on my stripped down recovery Snapshot is Windows itself, InstantRecovery, and one security program which automatically kills the Internet connection while I am in my recovery.

After I did all this work I made two Archives of this stripped down Snapshot on two different drives so in case something happens to my recovery Snapshot, I can just recover one of the Archives and not go through the time consuming deleting process again.

Acadia

 

I created an "empty snapshot", installed windows 7x64 afresh, stripped it down more I could, and finally installed my firewall and an anti-executable.

But you will need to have a windows DVD first...

Edit
Btw, it's really not a big trouble but an annoyance: I would prefer to have the links of the help menu open in the default browser. Here it is automaticly opening in IE and I use it about never but for windows updates.