Forget Tiny11, This Nano11 Script Shrinks Windows 11 Install To Just 2.28 GB

Windows 11 customization utilities are a dime a dozen these days, and more enthusiasts are customizing their installs every day, in a bid to remove unnecessary cruft and save on disk space. NTDEV's Tiny11 is one of the most popular utilities out there for this purpose, but the madlad (or madlady) went even further and released Nano11, a Windows installation customizer that strips the operating system down to the proverbial bone.

NTDEV posted a video of their utility doing its thing on a stock Windows 11 LTSC English ISO, and the results are quite impressive. The ISO itself went down to a mere 2.28 GB in size. The installation size ended at 8.32 GB, but then NTDEV proceeded to use the "compress" command on the entire drive to enable LZX compression, deleted the page file, and ended up with only 3.25 GB used. Amusingly enough, they chose to leave the out-of-box-experience wizard alone and had to answer Windows 11's silly questions after the OS was done installing.

Nano11 does its thing by removing most core services including audio, the Windows Component Store, Windows Update and Defender, and nearly all built-in device drivers; those alone take up a substantial size on a regular install. The instructions are quite simple: download the Nano11 script, download the ISO for whichever variant of Windows 11 you're using -- either from the Microsoft website or via the Media Creation Tool -- mount the ISO, and run Nano11. It'll ask you which drive contains the installation, and it'll merrily go on its way to make a slimmed-down ISO for you, in the same folder where you put the script.

Before you run off to make modded ISOs for your next Windows 11 install, maybe in context of the impending Windows 10 EOL, pause for a moment. First off, any bloat-removing utility should be used with extreme care, as it's easy to remove a system component that sooner or later some application or game will need. That can lead to especially fun troubleshooting sessions that can end with a full reinstall. Ask me how I know.

If that's not enough to convince you, NTDEV themselves say that Nano11 is "extreme experimental" (sic), "extremely aggressive", and that the resulting installation is not serviceable in any way, meaning that among other things, you won't be able to add or remove features, install any operating system updates, or drivers. Nano11 is strictly meant to be used in testing and development environments, or perhaps in virtualization, where the requirement is to have as small of an operating system image as possible just to run some specific software.

If that sounds like your jam, you can head over to the Nano11 website and download the script. And here's a pro tip: remember Windows' built-in file compression mentioned above? It's a cheap-n-cheerful way to save up quite a few GB on game libraries, documents, and even large programs. It doesn't affect performance for most applications, games in particular, as they pretty much only read data.