TimsterC

WOW, what a task this morning. To get as small as I can a VMware image of Microsoft XP so that people can download it without too much trouble.
I started by downloading the image from the USA ftp server. 7.67Gb in 1Gb .rar files.
I then expanded this out and it was a total of 13.6Gb when totally expanded. I then ran the tools recommended here. (I had to dig around for the vOptimizer, but found it on cNet’s website)
I managed to get the uncompressed VMware image down to 3.71Gb, which I was very happy with. Half the size of the original, almost.
Then I created a .rar file in 1Gb chucks so that people could download it easily. This turned out to be a stunning 1.4Gb in size.
So all in all a good mornings work. 6.27Gb saving on network traffic. Multiply that by the number of people to download it, 12-15 and that’s a monster saving of just under 95Gb