How to reduce Windows 8 system size?

Windows 8 consumer preview version is released. Anybody try out to reduce Windows 8 size? I have verified the method for Windows 7 is cannot workable on Windows 8.

Solution 1:

Microsoft has a Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool that you can use to reduce the size of an installation image for Windows 8. Some people have had better luck with it, as compared to other tools. Microsoft includes it in a Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit put out for Windows 8. You can download it from there.

Here's a forum thread about this very topic where several discuss different tools, with the consensus of DISM being the best being reached. Someone even provides a screen shot of a 705mb ISO they made of a Windows 8 installation distribution.

EDIT In fact, this post here in a different thread on the same forum gives you the exact command structure you would use with DISM to list what features the distribution image has, and what command structure you would use to remove features, to make the image smaller.

So... "How to reduce Windows 8 system size?"

DISM.exe /Online /English /Get-Features /Format:Table

That lists the current features.

DISM.exe /Online /Disable-Feature /Featurename:[name] /Remove

That removes the feature name you specific (eg: /Featurename:IIS-WebServer) ... which would literally reduce the size of Windows 8.

"Anybody try out to reduce Windows 8 size?" Yes. Multiple people have tried and succeeded with reducing the size of Windows 8. I've just told you where you can get the tools to do this which come directly from Microsoft, and how to use them, and a forum where people who are using these tools discuss how to use these tools, and have detailed their usage of these tools.