Few products have given me as much emotional satisfaction as XPlite from the Australian company LitePC.com. It’s an absolutely brilliant application that makes deleting unnecessary system components easy to remove. Just the progress dialog alone featuring two gears grinding up system icons is enough to pay for this product.

Using it is surprisingly simple and straightforward with “pick list” style interface with handy comments on what each component does. It knows about almost 100 different system components. Even if you do delete something that turned out to be important, the software makes use of the system restore point so you can still go back to your “last good configuration” at startup. That makes it a handy way to iteratively chop down your system into something much more manageable.

How much can you chop down depends on your needs, but you can see our other article on how I took an XP Home system with BeyondTV Link installed and whittled it down from 2 Gigs to down below 800Mb to fit on an inexpensive compact flash drive.

After downloading and registering the product, there is no real installation since everything fits in a single executable (that also makes it handy to remove when you are done). Upon launch, XPLite inventories your system for you and includes checkboxes on which components can be removed. If one component is dependent on another, XPLite will tell you and let you decide whether to remove both or neither. All you need to do is juust uncheck the boxes, click Next, and a few seconds of gear crunching progress dialog later, you are ready to reboot and try it out.

The only problem I had was finding the “advanced components” section which lets you remove even more stuff. That’s located by going to the settings button on the top, while the rest of the interface is navigated through tabs. Be careful about the “advanced components” section though, since you can actually remove the system restore feature as well, removing the safety net of the “last good configuration”.

For anyone wanting to substitute a hard drive with a quiet solid state drive to make your PC noiseless, this is definitely the best tool to lower the OS overhead and get everything to fit on an inexpensive compact flash card. The app will work on XP and Windows 2000, but they also have a similar product called 98lite which will make a surprisingly small Windows98 system if your application software supports that.

XPLite is a fantastic tool and a handy utility for anyone trying to get their system slimmed down and humming as fast as it can.