How to create lite Windows 7 for very small hard drive?

What is the total size of your hard drive?

A trick you could try is to install a big SD card into the tablet -- 64 GB would be a good size, if your tablet will take one that size. Windows 10 will use the available space on the SD card in order to do updates. This should get you through Windows 10 updates successfully.

I don't know how successful you would be in trying to install and run Windows 7 on this tablet. Not only because of not enough space on the hard drive, but also the fact that it is a tablet. However, I'll bet you could install and run Windows 8.1 on your tablet. Windows 8.1 can be run from an external drive, so you could probably install a big SD card in the tablet and run Windows 8.1 from the SD card. And you could run Classic Shell with Windows 8.1 to make it look and feel just like Windows 7. Best of all, Windows 8.1 will be supported by Microsoft till January of 2023. If you go the Windows 8.1 route by running it from an installed SD card, I suggest that you keep a good backup on hand, because sometimes SD cards fail.

Hi van2, welcome to Seven Forums.

You could create a customised ISO that you could use to install Windows 7.

There is various software available that will allow you to do this (to a certain extent), such as NTLite, RT7Lite, Win Toolkit etc. Although these have not been updated for a while (neither has Windows 7) they are still viable solution.

First though, you need to decide what you want to keep and what you don't want to keep (i.e. Windows Media Player etc).

Then you could use one of the above to slim the ISO down ready for a clean install onto the Tablet.

I hope this helps!

Hi van2,

van2 said:

I've tried these tools and for example RT7Lite gives an error message so it's unusable.
Has anyone here done this and recommends a method that actually works?

That's strange because I have used all three that I listed within the last three months and they all worked without any problems!
If you could perhaps tell us what is included in Windows 7 that you don't want installed then perhaps we can better help you!

Where did you get the ISO that you are going to use to reinstall?

I hope this helps!

Hi van2,

When I have used RT 7 Lite, it too gave me Script Errors, but all you need to do is to click Yes twice and carry on. Using RT 7 Lite can drastically reduce the total installation size, depending on what you want to remove. That's why I said in an earlier post, you need to decided what elements/components/programs etc you don't want to install!

Here is an excellent tutorial for using RT 7 Lite: Reduce Windows 7 OS Size

I hope this helps!