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Windows 95 in 4.47MB
Silvorgold writes "BOFH of MSBetas.net has been able to compress Windows 95 into 4.47 megabytes, making it the world's first sub-5mb bootable, registry editable, command-promptable, usable version of Windows 95.
He has written a small description about what he did, and also included screenshots (with his digital camera), and don't worry, these aren't fake screenshots."
I got winxp under 500mb (I was making a system out've spare parts from my closet and all I had was a 4gb hd). I didn't compress any of the dll's or exe's though, just deleted all the extra dllcache and redundant system files that xp maintains by default. If your upxing hundreds of dlls and system executables to save 5mb your officially obsessed, theres no point to that.
bite my glorious golden ass.
soo.. . why exactly DID they leave all the cabs, secondary software, unused images, back pad programs never intended for public use on a public cd commercial release (150 av megs for those who never tried)? Bigger is better.. lots of extra stuff for control, included room to grow. That means lots will be pruned, so anyone who is suprised by this, go to asm 04 after taking a few machine level programming classes. What I'm really interested in is seeing how small we can get a bootable linux with an independantly and fully function hack *W*ine type program so i can load all my needs onto the newer 128 meg hardrive keychains.. along with my *ORIGINAL* mp3's, artwork, photos, scripts / resumes, etc.. so i might have a bootable navicable computing environment that might be used anywhere near a modern computer.. regardless of resources.. think about it.
p
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
This leads to obvious comparisons of the size of Win95 compared to WinXP, and the changes in just 8 years.
What I find telling as well is that the Mac OSX calculator.app is SIX times the size of the total RAM in the first Mac, and over twice the size of a complete OS install.
Actually, this is interesting, if not particularly important.
It shows just exactly how much JUNK that a Windows install puts on your system. Crap you don't need... in most cases, crap you don't know about, can't get rid of, or don't want. I'm pissed because my Windows partition is 6 gigs and WinXP takes up nearly 2 gigs of that, while still running slower than my 7 year old computer did back in 1996. Windows is actually a pretty fast operating system, once you take away all the junk. This just shows how much junk there is.
Although, if someone had come out with this 6 years ago, I'd be clamoring for the code - I would have loved this instead of having to clear out the advertizing junk and IE and Outlook Express manually...
how soon till someone gets around to doing the same to XP. also, is this not a violation of the EULA?
Actually I think you would be surprised how many devices (at least here in Slovenia) are running Windows 95. I'm talking about devices like game machines and ... hm... how do you call the device a store has to keep money and print out a bill? :)
Sure, a lot of those devices used DOS before, but windows has drivers...
From the page:
;)
;) ) as the executables/libraries get uncompressed to memory when they get loaded by the Windows PE loader.
:)
The system uses UPX compression on the main EXEs and DLLs, btw, in case you were wondering how I got it down past redruM69's 5.35mb. I also removed some extra files, and restored functionality which the other micro 95 builds don't have. I'll try UPXing the entire system and windows folders later, see if I can get it down past 4 or 3mb
UPX compresses most executables to 30% of their normal size. But it also makes the system slower (well its Win95 so thats not a big issue
I'd like to see how small you can get the smallest floppy Linux using UPX, `strip` and some size squeezing GCC and linker flags
If you check the UPX examples you'll see that you can even get Emacs to less than 1 MB 8)
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
This had come out YEARS ago! A sub-5meg Win95 would've been a absolute godsend; I was still using Windows95 on my main computer up until this year even, so a tiny "distro" of it would've been truly excellent and a very good thing.
Back in the win 3.1 days, there was a guy that made a Win3.1 floppy. He made an installer so you could make one of your own without getting a warez copy. Back then the joke was "Double your hard drive space! Deltree windows!" I'd like to see a micro sized NT install or a live CD-ROM distro of windows.
The first Mac, the original "Macintosh", had 128 KB of RAM and a single internal 400 KB 3.5" floppy drive. Several months later, a 512 KB version was available. The "512K Mac" was sometimes called a "Fat Mac".
I don't recall how large the first few versions of the OS were, but I do recall that the OS (including the desktop "Finder", several utilities, control panels, and a printer driver or two), MacWrite, and MacPaint could fit on one 400 KB disk with room to spare. Such a disk shipped with the original Macs.
Of course the attorney ran DOS and Windows 95 for years without problems (Or so he assumes. Better shops at least used Netware). He doesn't really see much difference in running it now and will pay through the nose to do so because his last network admin said that he couldn't import the data to his new software since he never upgraded his initial install of Abacus. The attorney doesn't have to fork out money for WinCE since he's still got a shelf full of old Win95 media (and the licenses to go with them). A clever freelance tech could make a killing.
He did forget to mention that embedded devices would make for some portability. Imagine that same attorney having his typing secretaries pass around the device to enter the data into new software. It would make it way more appealing to a small firm to only have to buy one (and the support for one ;) )
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
You could run it easily on a DOS emulator on an old machine, for example, when I only had a 210MB HD on my RiscPC, I was glad to compress win95 to around 8-10MB in order to run a JDK, so that my DOS disc image would remain below 70MB...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Yep, that was the term I was looking for... It's still early in the morning here, so forgive me... :D
Like I said. There are a couple of firms in Slovenia, which make a living of of such devices and quite a few of them are actually running windows. These are quite complete systems for running a store or bar (and stuff like that)... Mostly it's windows 98 now, but I have seen quite a few running the 95 version.
Only lately (a year or so) is Linux being used in this field and the start is a slow one... Oh well...
7,033 bytes, to be exact. I'm sure the icon for the OS X calculator is at least twice that size- ever mind the UI buttons. o.O
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The site www.msbetas.net is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000.
And you all though it was running on the advertised super slim win95.....Leave giants like Contiki to host web sites!
Should we send them an award for the fastest slashdot time on record?
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
He used a better method, though: He deleted everything but win.exe, then tried to run it. When it failed, he monitored what file it was trying to process, and added that from a full installation. Repeat until it boots, and you can do this for any OS.
Lets see. Bill was worth about 50,000,000,000 dollars at this time too..
That is: 11,185 dollars and 68 cents PER BYTE.
I think he did pretty good, eh?
--ken
George, tell me about the rabbits...
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
(BTW, geeks used to call Windows 95 "MS-DOS 7.0 with illegally tied UI". Furthermore, geeks used to brag about their Norton Commander customizations, which is probably why The Borg decided...) Anyway, to make a short story long, this very topic is what got my fists to clench vis-a-vis Microsoft. I got mad while I was debugging my programs. If you're programming something in C and then have to fsck around in assembly language to use long file names with a modicum of portability, it's not a good-mood environment to begin with half the time. Then along comes this weird runtime error message something like, "For this (kernel call) to work, you must be using the full graphical Windows 95."
Hello? What on gawd$ green earth doe$ a graphical u$er interface have to do with file $y$tem kernel call$? It'$ a fuggen enigma, no? ;-)
If my memory serves me right, there were about 3 different ways to access the long filename services in MS-DOS 7.0, and for each detail in each way, you had to use either undocumented features or tiptoe around a gauntlet in code. Everything worked if you decided to stick with Microsoft's crammed-down-throat GUI, but if not ___. The D.O.J. slapped a wrist about it, but whatever.
Anyway, if I felt sorry for having wasted your time on this, I would announce that regret here. As it turns out, the whole MS-DOS 7.0 compatability stuff of my programs was/should_have_been inside of sections that were #ifdef'ed out of the compiler's view for target environments not in Windows 95 anyway.
Used this method (usually combined with stacker and 2m format) lots when I was at university, we didn't have access to hard disk storage so we'd squash things onto disk to use; I got the following working off single disks :
:) Although for doom a friend of mine wrote a program that hacked the .wad file and ripped out all the sound files 'cos those didn't compress with stacker.
Win3.11
Win3.11 booting into netscape
Win3.11 booting into Mirc/Pirch
X-wing (without cutscenes/movies)
Lemmings 2
Borland C (dos ver)
Turbo pascal 7 (dos ver)
A few others, including shareware doom off a single disk so that we could play it across the (novell) network without having to log in and be traced
Another older small realtime OS that is still around is iRMX. I was working on a aircraft simulator that used this unix-like OS on some very old Intel backplane computers with 386 CPUs. The parts for this where getting so hard to find and exspensive ($5000 for a used CPU card) that we adapted the hardware to interface with some old 200 Mhz pentiums we had lying around. The hardest part was Translating the old iRMX Pascal to Delphi and C running win 95 on 200 meg solid state drives(CF memory cards). Still works good to this date.
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Our TWEAK program (batch script) (http://thegoldenear.org/tweak/) removes some of the lesser bloat from Windows 2000 (probably exactly the same files exist in XP). its 'Windows Configuration' -> 'System file cleanup' section removes screensavers, temporary and backup files, wallpaper, Microsoft Sounds, excess icons and 'Media' bookmarks that Microsoft have been paid to advertise
No, I use Win95, with Office 2000 installed.
(and I have only 16mb RAM).
The machine is seven years old. Used it for
a long time as my primary machine, w/ Borland C
and VB6 (added later).
Just about filled that 1.19GB disk though.
Later shaved 20mb off for linux
http://sunsite.dk/mulinux
Plus, like the good old days of Stacker, you often gain speed (or at least moderate the lost speed) by saving disk access and transfer time. CPU decompression is often a lot faster than hard disk reading.
Check out this thread on neowin.net it's about shrinking down windows XP. I've gotten an install down to about 400M. It was on an old 2GB hardrive, that was in an old comp that I fixed up and gave away. Anyway you can shrink it down pretty small.
Next challenge for them, WinXP under 1 gig
:D
OK, here ya go. A detailed guide.
TechSpot OpenBoards - Cutting the fat - XP installs under 700mb
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle