Optimize Windows Server 2016 Datacenter by removing unnecessary components.
Optimize Windows Server 2016 Datacenter by removing unnecessary components.
Hey everyone, I'm diving into a challenge here. I'm looking for feedback or scores that could improve my current setup for de-bloating Windows Server 2016 Datacenter. With Microsoft's new per-core pricing, it makes sense to distribute the workload across several machines. The main hurdle is the default memory usage. I've been using a VMware VM with 4 CPU cores and 4 GB RAM. The disk space is 40GB, and when I connect via RDP, it uses about 1.5GB out of 4GB. I attached a screenshot from Task Manager showing the load. I cleaned up by removing several components: RSAT, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, Server Core WOW64, printing services, and even the scheduled task for Server Manager (saving 300MB). I also set performance priorities to favor active programs over background tasks. Now I'm down to just 0.9GB of RAM usage—amazing! Anyone can beat that with minimal pagefile use? Any tips to further reduce this while keeping the server functional? Looking forward to turning this into a PowerShell script for easier maintenance later. Cheers!