I
f you’re putting together a Windows 10 ISO, it figures that your
first step should be getting hold of a Windows 10 ISO. Problem
is, if you’re already running Windows, Microsoft doesn’t
make this easy: Head to http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-
download/windows10, and you’re redirected to run through the
company’s Media Creation Tool, rather than just being offered up
the goods. But using another OS, such as MacOS or something
Linux-based, gets you direct access to the ISO. The key is to have
your browser lie to the website by spoofing its user agent. In
Chrome, this means hitting Ctrl-Shift-I to open developer tools,
clicking the three dot icon, and selecting “Network Conditions”
from the “More tools” drop-down, then disabling automatic user
agent selection. Switch it to something like “Safari—iPad iOS 9,”
then head to that URL again to get past the Media Creation Tool.
Next, download the version of Windows for which you have a
key. The range of builds available on Microsoft’s customer-facing
website is relatively small, so if you’re after something more
obscure, head to https://uupdump.ml, and check out the files
there. It’s basically a non-official door into Microsoft’s official
update servers, meaning you can find Insider preview builds as
well as cumulative updates, and the like. It can be a bit baffling,
but it’s a useful site—make sure you have Aria2 installed (https://
aria2.github.io) if you want to download anything in ISO format.
ISOs are awkward to work with, given that they’re essentially
big sector-by-sector representations of optical media, rather
than a traditional archive. So, double-click that ISO to mount it,
and drag its contents to a folder on your PC—this is what we’ll
work on, before piecing it all back together at the end.WHAT TO USE
With a stock ISO in hand, it’s time to make a choice about just how
you’re going to prepare your custom version. You could go one
of two ways. One, you could use an appropriate tool to dig into
the files within the ISO and alter them; or two, you could install
Windows on a suitable donor machine, tweak it there, and turn
that installation back into a viable installable image. Each has its
advantages. The former is the better choice if you’re likely to want
to take your custom Windows 10 install to multiple machines with
different hardware configurations, while the latter is a commonlyused enterprise tool, perfect for reimaging multiple machines
with the same makeup—or one rig that’s frequently reinstalled.
Since we’re presuming you’re building an ISO for generalized
personal use, it’s probably best to focus option one. But what
to use? Microsoft’s key tool is Deployment Image Servicing and
Management, or DISM. It’s part of Microsoft’s deployment tools
package, and primarily built to work on offline images, be they
VHDs created from existing installations, or the WIM files found
on Windows 10 ISOs that contain the core of the OS. And, while
it’s no doubt powerful, it’s also one of those programs that would
take an entire issue of Maximum PC to properly explain. Check
out Microsoft’s official resources at https://bit.ly/2IaJI5A if you’d
like to find out more for yourself.
A few words of warning: Applying DISM tweaks, or any
alterations for that matter, to an ISO is innocent enough, but using
its extended features to mess around with a “production system”
(read: your precious desktop) could be asking for trouble. These
are powerful tools, capable of cutting out far more than you might
actually think useful, and can tear a system apart if inadvertently
set loose. Even shaving away components from an ISO can cause
troubles down the line, because you may lack the prerequisites
for Windows updates.LOOKING GOOD
So, the good thing about DISM being a command-line tool is that
you don’t necessarily need to go in raw—there are interfaces out
there with all the hard work built into them, and you just need to
choose what you want to do. One of these is GUI-based DISM++
(though it apparently uses its own low-level code rather than
piggybacking on DISM itself), which shows its Chinese heritage
through occasional non-translated sections. Another is MSMG
Toolkit, put together by the fine folks over at Major Geeks, which
is similarly powerful, but rather obtuse, too.
Then there’s NTlite. It is, by some margin, the most polished
and powerful Windows precustomizer out there, having
spawned from Windows XP tweaking tool Nlite, and grown
in the subsequent five years since that was put out to pasture.
Grab the installer from http://ntlite.com/download, install it, and
select the Free license to start with—the full thing is unlockedYou need to work on the W indows installer files from a folder. We wouldn’t blame you if you were a bit baffled by UUP Dump.NTlite is the most polished and powerful Windows
precustomizer, having spawned from Nlite, and grown
in the five years since that was put out to pasture.
custom Windows installer
46 MAXIMUMPC JUN 2019 maximumpc.com