Quote Originally Posted by Husar
Now all you need is a Pentium 2, a Voodoo 3 graphicscard, downgrade to 128MB RAM and a 15" CRT monitor and you're most likely the happiest man on earth.


Personally I wouldn't bother with all of that. If you want to get it as lightweight as possible there are alot of tweaks you can try. Once you've set the Windows classic theme, you should download tweakUI and install it, then copy your desktop preferences to the login screen's desktop preferences (actually user NT AUTHORITY/SYSTEM's desktop preferences). After this, stop and disable the themes service, go into the control panel -> users -> change how users log on -> use the welcome screen=off, fast user switching=off, and reboot. The old Win2k style log in system will then be in use. When logging in and out it wno't keep changing the schema, which is annoying and slows down the boot process.

Another thing you can adjust in tweakui is the menu delay. With this you can have instant menus that are there as soon as you mouse over them. This is better than stupid menus that delay a fraction of a second or unfold. This assumes that you've already disabled all of the of the eye candy in performance options apart from font smoothing and whole window dragging. You can also easily enable the classic search in explorer.

The biggest gain comes from disabling useless system services. There is a thread in here somewhere started by lemur that links to a guide. I had added some more to it.