Dear Alacrán, thanks for answering so promptly and clearly. wimbooting deprecated? pls propose a valid substitute both in terms of space and time and I pledge to go for it. is its only convenient use rambooting? well that is what I am doing most of the time. what u say about new files or files that get written to is exactly what I get here now and then - that is why I re-wimboot my combo anytime I do make a change (mainly new drivers), and it takes as little as a couple of minutes here (I am probably on my 50th edition starting from the same wim+vhd, which has been getting changed either way (well, more often by making another wim from the same vhd than the other way round)). For the rest, as u have noticed from my previous posts, since I redirected $$* and *.etl files to a ramdisk, I have hardly had any used space changes. Like u, I have also managed to shrink my vhd to half a gig (used space 250), but in order to be sure to have all pics and videos thumbnailed properly, I have been on the safest side with 1.5gig total size, and 1gig from a couple of days ago onwards. In both cases used space has been about half as much. everything is running fine, no freezing even with the most extreme compression I have found, which is
compact /c /s /a /i /exe:lzx "h:\*"
or
compact /c /s /a /i /exe:lzx "v:\*"
If u tell me how to keep my vhd to half a gig and still be able to see my pics and videos thumbnailed properly (no blank thumbnails) when I open their folders, I see no other reason for enlarging it to 1 or 1 and a half gigs.
U also mentioned wimlib. Did u have wimlib in mind when u thought of a valid replacement for wimboot or was it another tool?
winlib poses more problems to newbies, I can never get around all those options without making crucial mistakes, but if u say it is worth it, I will give it a try, provided it does something substantially better than wimboot, lest it should be deprecated as well.
nino