I recently purchased a refurbished Dell XPS 400 from the Dell Outlet for a song, and was attempting to install a clean version of Windows XP Professional on it. Unfortunately, the Windows installer doesn’t have drivers for the new-fangled Intel AHCI SATA controller out-of-the-box, so the installer won’t see the disk drives and proceeds berate the idiotic user for attempting to install an OS on a machine with no disk drives. Tsk, tsk!

Both Intel and Dell provide drivers, and Windows thoughfully allows you to specify the need for additional controller drivers during the beginning of the install process. What the geniuses at Redmond did, however, was hard-code the installer to only look for drivers on a floppy drive. It’s 2006 Bill: what gives? Needless to say, I got all excited! I’ve always wanted to have an excuse to blow the dust off my ThinkPad’s USB floppy drive and put it to good use. All that joy soon left as I spent 30 minutes hunting around my apartment for a floppy. Try as I might to dig through the archive of computer history, there was nary a diskette to be found.

Not to be dismayed, I turned to the G-man and found that I was not out of luck. The same method I had previously used to slipstream service packs into the Windows install media would allow me to insert any necessary drivers. The instructions are fairly complex, but easy enough to follow, despite being a convoluted process. About 30 minutes into the process, right before I was about to burn a test CD of my custom install disk, I stumbled upon an amazing program: nLite.

This nifty freeware utility supplies one with an easy to navigate GUI that will customize a Windows CD. I was able to slipstream in the latest service pack, hotfixes, rip out unnecessary Windows components, insert the new drivers, and supply the information necessary to kick off an unattended install in one fell swoop. Took about 15 minutes of my time, and saved me from the violation of using a floppy diskette to set up a Dual Core system. Ugh.

Definitely a neat tool. Given more time, I think I’ll go back and further customize the CD to rip out absolutely everything that I don’t use. You are also given the option to run post-install scripts to install any 3rd party utilities that aren’t already provided as nLite addons.