Vista - Shrink .vhd when using differencing disks?

I am currently using differencing disks which works fine but one problem
is that the .vhd files is growing a lot (for example I have one which
has really not much installed on it other than swap file compared to the
base disk and the vhd has grown to 3.4 GB) and I don't see any options
to shrink a differencing vhd disk (only merging is available). Note I am
talking about the "final" differencing file not the parent file.

Any way to shrink the VHD when using differencing disks?

Looks like using differencing disks will not save me much diskspace
(limited because I am using a laptop, however I have got an external
drive so not that much problem anymore. Still nice to save some space so
I don't need to bring the external drive "on the road") in the end.

Probably best option is maybe to use merge and individual vhds not using
differencing disks, at least for my more often used VHDs.

It is still nice to use differential disks when you need to setup a new
environment (instead of having to copy a 10+ GB vdh file).

Another question regarding differencing disks. What happens if you move
the location of the base disk (guess the path to base disk is stored in
the vhd)?

On Fri, 5 Dec 2008 14:37:08 +0100, Magnusb <magnusb@xxxxxx> wrote:
No way to shrink differencing disks without merging.

When you move the base, and then try to start the VM, you'll be
prompted for the location of the base image.

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

In article <ofuij49ofs93ee905rsj8kf2e9uh1n61la@xxxxxx>, noreply.-
@-.essjae.com says...Thank you Steve,

yeah I was afraid that it was not possible. Maybe it can be done by some
external tools but not heard of any that can do it.