Building HTPC looking for stripped down 7 with WMC

[darkstarsinner]

Okay so I figured sevenforums would be the place to get a little assistance with this. I just put together my first HTPC using some old/spare parts I had. I want to install a bare minimum Win7 that will boot directly to WMC. I have it set up now but it's the full Win7.


Here's what I need to do:

Stripped bare Windows 7 install (just a shell)
Direct Boot WMC
Hulu app
Netflix app
Blu-Ray program
All possible Codecs for the various Movie files I already have
Best performance possible
Networking between HTPC and my desktop workhorse


Here are my stats:

HTPC:

Phenom II 965 BE
Corsair Dominator (8GB)
MSI 880GM-E41
OB GPU (will be swapping cards out when I order my new one for the desktop)
Coolermaster 360 slim case
250GB HDD (will be swapping in a 2TB soon)

Workhorse:

FX-8120 BE
Corsair Vengeance (16GB)
MSI 890fxa-GD70
MSI Hawk 5770 Radeon
60GB SSD (OS)
2TB RAID0 (4x500GB HDD)



Can anybody lend a hand here? I would greatly appreciate it.


Also a would like to stream media from my Workhorse as I have almost 200GB of movies and really down't want to transfer them. Thanks all.

 

[Everlong]

You can use vLite to customise a Windows installation before installing. I've not used it myself, and I'm pretty sure it works with Windows 7, but I think you have a Windows 7 DVD then it creates a .iso image from it and lets you customise what you want/don't want on it, and I think you can add stuff to it as well. You can then burn the .iso back to a blank DVD, or setup a USB pen drive to install from.

There's a pretty thorough guide here, worth a try: How to create a custom Windows Vista Installation DVD – Simple Help

You can just add WMC to the startup section in msconfig so it loads up as Windows starts.

If your HTPC and Workhorse are on the same network then you can easily just stream over the network through WMC to watch the media.

 

[darkstarsinner]

I'll give that a try again. I ran it earlier to a usb drive but it wouldn't boot.

 

[Everlong]

Does it set the USB drive up to be bootable? Once the .iso is made, try using the Windows 7 USB download tool to make the USB drive bootable and copy the .iso to it, or you can do it manually through command prompt and open the .iso and copy and paste the files to it.

 

[darkstarsinner]

I think I've got it all set up. There are still a few tweaks I would like to see but it runs pretty smooth for now.