Adding programs to WinPE

I have been working away on doing this at my company and it is actually really easy to run a browser in WinPE. All you need to do is download a portable browser (Chrome, Firefox etc... IE is the only one that is not able to be portable).

So search online for "Chrome portable" or "Firefox portable" and download that. Then move the portable browser into the WinPE image (I put it in %systemdrive%\windows\system32\).

Once you are at the command prompt in WinPE you can just type the name of the executable and it will run the portable browser.

An example of this is: I want to run Google Chrome in WinPE, I downloaded the portable Chrome browser and moved the folder and files into the WinPE image under the system32 folder. I boot in WinPE and at command prompt I type:

x:\windows\system32\googlechromeportable\googlechromeportable.exe

Now you have a web browser in WinPE. You may have to change your directories to point to wherever you injected the browser into the image, but you get the point. After doing that, you can also create a batch file to run this at WinPE startup but thats another topic.

When I made my PE3 disk, I applied the .wim to a blank hard drive on my test machine and made edits while booted from the hard drive. Then I would commit the changes back to a .wim and reboot to see if everything worked. I found this to be very convenient when adding programs (especially non-portable apps) because shortcuts had targets that actually existed and the apps were being tested in the actual environment they were expected to run in before they were actually committed to a disk. Most apps can be installed normally as you would in normal windows using this method. And any registry edits and temp files are saved and it just works better all around because every bit of that is being saved back to a .wim