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."

Comments

Interesting if not important.

[Funksaw]

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...

Re:5 megs.. that actually means a lot of things..

[gfody]

most of the extra bloat in windows is the enourmass device driver database (that makes the automagical plug and play thing work). this guy actually deleted plenty of system files though, I guess by trial and error.. delete a file, see if solitair runs, delete a file, etc. problem is the win32 api consists of way more than just user32.dll. I'd bet trying to run anything other than solitair results in an "unable to locate advapixxxx.dll"

Cheated with UPX

[bazik]

From the page:

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 ;) ) as the executables/libraries get uncompressed to memory when they get loaded by the Windows PE loader.

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)

A Friend of Mine Did This

[dupper]

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.

Re:Used that method for lots of stuff...

[mrb000gus]

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 :
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 :) 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.