after capturing the image, let it go back through the specialization process and sign on as the local Administrator account). To see what I mean, run the “Get-WindowsOptionalFeature -online” command after you’ve disabled all the features with the -Remove switch and rebooted (i.e. It used to, but starting with Windows 10 it no longer does. Yes, there is a “-Remove” switch on the Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature cmdlet (and the corresponding DISM command line), but it doesn’t actually do anything. That second point is worth discussing a little more. You can’t actually remove optional features, you can just turn them off.

There aren’t many features on demand installed by default, so not much to remove there.So add a restart computer step after removing the features. The “Exit 3010” didn’t work either as the device didn’t restart until it found pending file rename operations later. Again, that can be done with a pretty simple script (with the try/catch logic needed to handle the terminating error that you get when trying to remove a capability that can’t be removed): I’ve never understood why Windows 10 has both “Windows capabilities” (features on demand) and “Windows optional features.” But regardless, let’s try to remove all of those to see if it makes any difference. Removing optional features and capabilities How much disk space is freed up by that process? The end result of that shows 40 apps (installed per-user) remain, along with zero provisioning apps (which doesn’t include the “hidden” system ones that you can’t touch, most of which correspond to those 40 per-user apps). Some are used as part of the operating system so they can’t be removed, but for simplicity let’s remove the rest using a trivial script added to the MDT task sequence: (Personally, I like Calculator, but can’t say that I use too many of the others.) So, let’s remove as many of them as we can. There are lots of people that don’t like the in-box apps anyway. The image got a little bigger, which can probably be attributed to event log growth, but that’s quite reasonable (for now at least). (I ran into a bug in MDT while doing this, so check out this post if you haven’t already.) To do that “sanity test,” I’ll use an MDT task sequence. The first exercise is to prove that deploying that OS to a virtual machine, sysprepping it, and then capturing a new image - without changing anything - doesn’t result in a significant change of size. (And yes, it’s slowly getting bigger.) But if you wanted to make a smaller image, how much smaller is even possible? Let’s see if we can find out.Īs I mentioned, the size of Windows 10 Enterprise exported from the Windows 10 20H2 business ISO is 4.67GB: In my previous post, I talked about the size of Windows 10.

Small windows iso