Packing VMs

Today was a complex chain of events. I went to bed last night with the hope of implementing my card chess game in flash for Kongregate in the morning. First up was a refresher on the exact type of flash required for Kongregate, and another hunt around for an open source alternative. Although ExplodingFerret wrote up a free tool version of the Shootorials, I was hoping for at least an IDE to work in. Flash CS4 wasn't available for trial the last time I looked, but it's now up so I grabbed it and started prepping a VM test box.

I had noticed on the Office 2007 VM that there were critical updates coming in thick and fast, so I thought I may as well update the base XP SP2 image. 50 updates and 3 hours later and it's ready to go, apart from the image now being 6Gb instead of the starting 1.7Gb.

After gutting the $ntuninstall directories and generally cleaning the image up the VHD was still at the 6Gb mark! A quick google revealed that I needed to zero out the VM before compacting. Still only reduced it to 2.8Gb. ~1Gb just for SP3 and windows updates? Ouch.

So now it's 7pm and I still haven't got Flash up and running yet. Not looking good for finishing something today ...