Best practices for presets

Y

Young Free

New Member
What's the best approach for managing presets? I was thinking of working on each section in stages, testing everything and then saving that as a separate preset, before finally merging all the individual presets at the end. Or even testing groups of (merged) presets. I have a lot of experience with Winreducer, but this seems like a big step up and it's easy to get overwhelmed by all the choices.
 
I follow this strategy for minimizing frustration:

- Do the basics first: Updates, adding & removing Features, and Drivers. Don't touch tweaks or services. If you get too greedy, it will be harder to troubleshoot a problem. Is this broken from a tweak setting, or are we missing packages? Image and test.

- Do Post-Setup next. Everything executed in post-setup can be tested live using CMD or reg.exe -- except for file paths. Uninstall an app and try the silent install. Run a PowerShell script, see if it works. Update your image, and test.

- Now with a working base, move on to Settings & Services. If you make mistakes, most of this can be "undone" on the live install. Find the tweak name in the preset and you can Google match the regedit (and fix it). Turn any disabled services back on. Some desktop tweaks have to be changed as a group to work as expected.

- Remove or disable in small batches. Name your presets by timestamps or batch numbers. When you break something, it's easier to go back one version and compare the changes. Write good notes to yourself, you'll forgot something a year from now.

- Get modular and merge separate presets. Have clearly distinct goals for each "module". When you share a collection of "modules", other people can skip the parts they don't care about.

- Use a VM if you have one. This allows you be adventurous, and break things. Not everyone has a spare system, or blank drive to test new images on. 4GB/40 GB virtual profile is enough for testing, installs are mostly disk-bound. The exception is if you're using ESD compressed images, which require more CPU to process. Compress only when you're done making edits.

- Have fun. It's not a race to finish early, or a competition for the slimmest ISO. What matters is can you keep the image updated over time.
 
Thanks so much. I will keep all that in mind. I started with the updates and removing unneeded editions, now I'm using the resulting ISO as a base, I assume that's OK. I've found I like to push it till it breaks, then by going back and finding out what went wrong I learn a lot more, especially about how things are interrelated, rather than being afraid to remove or change too much.
 
I already know more or less what to remove and what to keep so I used a preset for everything but in the last NTLite builds I started having problems with that.

So what I've been doing is removing components, configuring services and settings with one preset and adding .reg files with another one. It looks like NTLite protects some keys in the registry when you are removing components.

My presets are advanced, but even for a beginner while NTLite is having this problem I recommend adding .reg files in a separate session from which you remove components. The thread I created reporting the issue remains without a response from nuhi (as does most of what I post) so I assume the issue remains.
 
if you are "that hardcore" editing a iso. then do step by step updates, features, components, settings, custom regs etc

if you are soft editing just do it np
 
wise old owls come out to play, hehehe. Patience is your friend, Impatience is your enemy. :cool:
pinned.
 
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