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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."
PicoBSD made EVIL!
"Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the screenshots :) Oh, and don't hot-link to them, my host will kill me. Thanks!"
Yes. Yes, he will.
If all the world's a stage, anyone who says they want better lighting spends far too much time in a dark theatre.
Already /.ed and not yet 5 comments?
Oh wait, it's Windows95.
Great! Now I can crash my PDA with 8mb of storage space! Thanks!
Because we can... why else?
:)
I think this is pretty cool. Next challenge for them, WinXP under 1 gig
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
Does it have a full-featured blue screen of death?
Are you an open source warrior?
Here's a mirror:
0x0D 0x0A
#126 - Slashdotter - Aug 8, 2003 02:58
/. - Aug 8, 2003 03:04
Slashdotting, coming your way....
#127 -
Here comes the flood of Slashdotters....Prepare for server meltdown
Loomis
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
ou can discuss this at our official community, over at NeoNerds.net.
:)
;)
:) Oh, and don't hot-link to them, my host will kill me. Thanks!
Update: Chat with me in real-time at irc://irc.xbetas.com/Micro95
A FULL set of configuration files; Win.ini, system.ini, Registry, is available in our IRC channel. If you're thinking of building your own version of Micro95, be sure to head over there to find out more information about the project.
Okay, over the past couple of days you will have heard plenty of news about the latest Windows 95 in 10mb, created by Richard L. James from over at Wimborne.org. And then, there was redruM69, who managed to get 95 down to 5.35mb.
However, what you are about to hear is a world first.
Tonight, I created the world's first sub-5mb bootable, registry editable, command- promptable, usable version of Windows 95. And what's more, you can build the system yourself, if you know how.
But if I simply made this claim, you might laugh, you might mock. You might even go "hahaha you lamer". So I'm not just going to make this claim. I'm going to prove it. Here's the screenshots (taken with the camera):
Lemme guess. They're fakes, right? No they're not, but you don't believe me anyway, so here's the directory listing.
Windows 95 4.47mb Directory Listing
Well, I'm afraid that's all I can give you. I'm currently working on loading this into RAM, and also an installer for those of you with a legit copy of Windows 95. Aaaand I think that's all I can do
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
My 16mb Office project will continue, as well as myself and Richard's collaboration on the micro 95 with TCP/IP Stack project, for those of you who wish to use this as a small browsing OS, etc. I'll also see if I can restore sound support to this, as I'm aware quite a few of you are interested in using this project as a basis for car MP3 players.
I'd also like to make it quite clear that none of this would have been possible without the help of Richard L James and his Shrinking Windows project. Also worthy of a big mention is redruM69, who sucessfully brought Windows 95 down to 5.35mb.
You can discuss this at our official community, over at NeoNerds.net.
Update: Chat with me in real-time at irc://irc.xbetas.com/Micro95
A FULL set of configuration files; Win.ini, system.ini, Registry, is available in our IRC channel. If you're thinking of building your own version of Micro95, be sure to head over there to find out more information about the project.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the screenshots
BOFH
It's 3:00 on the East coast. I wonder if the site is based on that Windows 95 thingy he's made...
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Maybe next story posted should be a collection to pay his ISP bill.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Heh, the Contiki server was up for a longer time ;)
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
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.
I'm still waiting for Windows 95 on a floppy.
Tierce
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
In other breaking news, the crew at DOSBeta.org have created a fully bootable DOS 5 system on a single 3.5 inch floppy.
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 HAS to be a hoax. Windows95 ain't usable by any reasonable definition of the word.
Linux came out 10 years ago. Now why would you want to boot that for?
Linux is about freedom of choice, right? If Linux is all there is, there will be no more choice, so a 5MB Win95 bootable image is nice to have...
Not that I will be using it for anything, but still...
Some people like to step on bugs to hear the sound it makes.
Same principle here.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
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?
Complete list of uses for this:
[end list]
John Kerry is a Joke!
Yes you could do that. You could also jump up and down like a monkey, but that, like your comment, is completely and totally unrelated to the project.
Do you really think he shrunk Windows 95 because he didn't have a big enough hard drive? Come on now.
Maybe it's just that these "Hard drives are cheap" posts are getting to be the replacement for the "In Soviet Russia" posts.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
- Because it's there. While Linux is fairly easy to get a useful Linux distro under 2 MB, you can do things like strip the kernel to the bare essentials. Needless to say, you can't do that under Windows; there's a lot more challenge in getting Win 95 under 5 MB.
- Also, making Win95 fit in small spaces may be of interest to people who want to run legacy Windows apps on embedded devices. I could see this put on an old Pentium with an all-in-one motherboard and a 16 MB solid state drive, with room for a small program or two. The only issue would be swap space. This might be useful in places looking for a small, simple pseudo-embedded PC that needs to run Windows apps. Linux might be better for 95% of these kinds of tasks, but if Windows is necessary to run legacy apps, then it would be best to run, well, Windows.
While it might not be eminently practical, neither is, say, running Linux or NetBSD on some obscure piece of hardware. Nifty hacks like this aren't always done for practical reasons; they're just as often done for fun.That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
Work on Linux is ongoing, and there's a whole community on offer if you have problems. Windows 95, OTOH, is at least a generation old, and has already been EOL-ed by Microsoft.
More than mere navel gazing.
I'm not sure if it's up still but I found one at http://www.mskf.org/mirrors/slimline/slimline.htm
Jeez, I screwed up the link there. It's supposed to be to tomsrtbt, the best damn floppy Linux distro anywhere.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
I don't think any company would trust Windows 95 as an embeded solution. WindowsCE already covers that area and works much more efficiently. This is more of a just a fun trick to do with Windows 95 than anything.
Also, considering how many files they removed from the system, I would be suprised if anything could run with all those missing DLL files.
wanna bet?
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...
How Small the people with the source code could make it.
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...
From their forum: :: prays :: I hope that b/w limit doesn't kick in
<BLOCKQUOTE>
#7 - BOFH - Aug 7, 2003 00:52<BR>
Eek... I think we're on an OC12, though, so we should be okay...
</BLOCKQUOTE>
I guess that is what he was using as an OS for his server, he got /. 'ed when the post went up
Whats A sig anyway
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.
Reminds me of that tiny copy of Windows 3.1 that came on the Windows 95 disc. Used only during installation, a certain cab file contained all the necessary files to run 3.1 apps. All one needed to do was decompress the file, copy the Program Manager or any other shell program to the same directory, and add it into the win.ini (or was it the system.ini?) file. The entire thing was so small, it fit comfortably onto a 1.44 meg floppy.
I think the file was user.cab, although I'm not sure. Guess I gotta dig up that old 95 install disc.
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
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.
Now if it can run on my old PC I can finally start playing some of those old DOS games that I like. Toonstruck for example
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
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.
From this page, it appears that the previous 'record holder', 5.35 MB, did not use an executable packer or other compression.
;). Just what is the purpose of this, and at what point do your modifications, whether extreme, or just running binaries through an executable packer, defeat the purpose of doing this in the first place?
"Apparently only 5.35Mb in size (at the moment.... I'm told this might go down!) - without using UPX / any compression"
So, is what this fellow has done a superior acheivement, or did he mostly just run an executable packer on a few binaries?
Certainly if the idea here is to just shrink the physical disk space usage we can do better than either of these entries by compressing all files and hacking the Windows I/O subsystem calls to handle our compression.
I think all of this raises an interesting question. (ok, so it's not interesting at all, but I've had similar issues come up in a lot of other unofficial sort of 'competitions' like this, and we all just kind of use interest at that point
Is the idea to have the smallest possible OS capable of doing x or y?
Is the idea to have the smallest possible OS that looks like Windows 95?
Is the idea to have the smallest possible 'distribution' of Windows 95 attainable by just removing unecessary features?
Do we want smallest in terms of RAM usage, or smallest in terms of disk space? What do we then if we run it on a RAM disk? Which space counts?
Surely depending up just what is the goal here, we can do a lot better than 4.47 MB.
I guess I don't 'get it', what they're doing =)
That's Windows users for you!
There is a micro Linux distribution floating around somewhere that provides an X server in under 2 MB of physical disk space (but 4 or 8 MB of RAM), but I can't recall the name of it just now.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
I've run Windows 95 in 4MB RAM "just to see if it would". {well, alright; I was waiting for some 16MB SIMMs to be delivered, and found some 1MB ones in a drawer}. It did. Eventually!
I can't honestly recommend it to anyone, though.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Cheaper than an SCO/Linux solution :)
used to be very popular on the Amiga, as were ramdisks. I remember back before I had a hark disk having a single compressed boot floppy that would copyitself into the RAD:, which was a recoverable and bootable ramdisk. the system startup scripts would check to see if the boot volume was RAD: or a floppy and take the appropriate action. After the initial load system reboots were very fast. This also made life with only a single or if you were lucky dual floppy drives very much easier.
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
Menuet Homepage
several times I've been able to make Windows fit into 0 MB.
C|N>K
you'll find gigs of crap in the *cache folders. disable automatic system recovery and file auditing (I forget what the actual services are called) and clear out those directories. look at a file listing of your hd from biggest to smallest and you'll notice plenty of redundant .cab and .dll files that are just plain FAT. search the net for a slimmed down registry, or use a recursive reg cleaner on your own reg (recommended if its not a fresh install) and viola a relatively small XP install
bite my glorious golden ass.
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.
Step 1. compress win 95 to 5 megs
Step 2. compress win 95 to 4 megs
Step 3. compress win 95 to 3 megs
Step 4. compress win 95 to 2 megs
Step 5. compress win 95 to 1 megs
Step 6. compress win 95 to nothing
Step 7. Repeat process with all Microsoft products and Microsft itself until there is nothing.
I'd like to see this done with NT4
"I took redruM69's 5.35Mb version and upx'd it. W00t! 1 4r 1337!!!!!! f33r m33!!!!"
Hmm. Not exactly ground breaking stuff.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Making Windozz 95 useable - now that is an accomplishment!
Incidently Mungkie used win95 at one point for a number of epos projects. Using win95 we managed to create an uncompressed OS image of ~3.9Mb which meant we could normally fit our entire system and application on a 32Mbit ROM (we can half that size with compression but more system RAM is then required). Now using linux we can get the system in the same ROM but we get far far better features, security and a more stable system. We have now switched to linux only development on all work (unless a customer insists on a MS platform).
Now just to reiterate the exact reasons for reducing system size!!!. SMALLER SYSTEMS ARE CHEAPER AND SIMPLER TO DEVELOP, PRODUCE, AND MAINTAIN.
The savings made in development time mean we have more time to eat bananas.
The savings made on hardware costs make our systems (that we sell!) more competetive and increase our profit margins.
The savings made in maintenance mean our products are reliable and our customers want to buy from us again, and saves us time and money in supporting customers and paying for call centers.
Win95 was OK in its time but things have changed.
embedded linux
5 MB of proper code, and
645 MB of added junk.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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!
Here is Win95 reduced to about 33K..and if I reduce the color palette, I think I can get it under 25K at the same resolution...
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Why don't you just use DOS which fits on a single floppy ?
Apparently there are other folks that do this for Win98 and WinME as well. They provide some good arguments (marketing, that is :) for why this is better than WinCE.
The litepc folks also have utility called 98lite professional that removes all web integration from Win98 - just to show it was doable (at about the time MS said it couldn't be done)
I don't think any company would trust Windows 95 as an embeded solution. WindowsCE already covers that area and works much more efficiently. This is more of a just a fun trick to do with Windows 95 than anything.
if you think any company trusts WinCE for embedded control then you are nuts.
EVERYTHING is either a Realtime OS like RTDOS or another.
when you have lives at stake with heavy machinery or a embedded PC running a process control you dont use crap like Windows CE.
that is purely for the toys we call PDA's where it doesnt matter if it crashes or messes up in any way.
the world of embedded is ALOT larger than all of you think. Rocket control, autopilot, control your drinking water purification, sewage treatment, twinkie manufacturing...
PDA's and consumer items are a tiny corner of enbedded systems.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
(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.
Looks like he tried to use Win95 to run the site maybe?
/.'d
Error: No site configured at this address.
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
I saw "Die, Server, Die" back in 1995 when it was released. Despite the protests of adults who really did know better, I watched it. The ferocity of the article in parts literally made me back away from it, starting and screaming with the slightest noise; it made my skin crawl. Damn, but it was good!! Though the article is old, it's still in color, and I can still to this day remember the lurid splashes of red in some of the bloodier scenes.
The plot of "Die, Server, Die" is very simple. Cowboy Neal plays the part of a wealthy, but crippled, BOFH, on whose property Windows crashes one day. After noticing that the area where Windows landed becomes lush with abundant vegetation, he has his servants retrieve pieces of Windows, and he tried to replicate the effect the installations had, first in his greenhouse, then with other living things, like animals.... Of course, you don't get to know this until the latter part of the article.
The preceding information is revealed grudgingly by the landowner only after his guests, an attractive couple, become increasingly alarmed by the things they discover on his grounds. One of them is a bestiary of...things...kept under lock and key; a zoo of the failed experiments on animals with installations of Windows. The worst is an attack by a deranged, zombie-like clippy-thing one night during a storm; after fighting it off, it literally decays in the rain as they watch.
Not only do you get unusual moments of Slashdot like these in the article, but they are staged with masterful direction, especially the suspense building to the moment of shock; it is unbearable. Very few articles could make my hair stand on end, even that long ago, and "Die, Server, Die", was one of them. Of course, in the grand old tradition of Slashdot articles, the best is saved for last, and you're not disappointed. Even the BOFH, who, repenting, tries to destroy the Windows installations in his possession, is infected with what they carry, and in turn, he must be destroyed. But will the hero carry the day? And if he does, what of the other Windows installations still in the ground? And the things in the utzoo?
"Die, Server, Die" is a superb showcase for one of Slashdot's legendary performers, Cowboy Neal, and it's a fantastic example of intelligently directed and made Slashdot. Run, don't walk, to wherever you can get a mirror of this article.
... all but 256 were duplicates. So that's 195312500 per unique byte!
Man, if I had that job, just sit and make up bytes all day long...
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.
Science is the Real TRUTH!
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
4.47 megabytes? Some guy told me I'd never need more than 640K!
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
The copy of XP I'm working with at work at the moment is 14MB. It boots to a command prompt and works. No hackery required; XP Embedded lets you do this. =)
Torne
Could you imagine if MS had originally released Win95 with such a small footprint?
I imagine I would have liked the OS a lot more. When it first came out, I stuck with 3.11 (until I found out about Diablo) because it ran much faster and had a smaller footprint. I remember being thoroughly disappointed at the performance hit when I first booted into Win95...
Now I know that a smaller footprint doesn't automatically mean more better performance. However, there seems to be an unofficial connection between the two, because the programmer who strives for a small footprint is probably a better programmer, and is looking for ways to best optimize his/her code. Also, with such a small footprint there is quite likely less bugs. Cutting down that much bloat probably means that identical pieces of code could be cut down to one instance, and if that one instance has a bug, it will not only be more noticeable (since it gets executed more often) but also easier to fix.
But I think I know why MS didn't take this approach - money. Sloppier code = less development costs, and bigger bloat means more hardware upgrades, which means more Windows licenses (and Office licenses, etc.). Not to mention the general public would be more impressed with a gigantic OS than a tiny one. So I'm disappointed, but not surprised.
I wonder how much bloat could be removed from XP while still maintaining 90% of the features.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
I have a Win-95 computer, used for all my engineering work until last year and now only 2-4 times per week. I never loaded games, and was very careful about programs I added. However I used it for circuit analysis, PCBoard layout and other complex programs including photoshop. Except for Netscape and LView open at the same time, it almost never crashes or hangs-up. It is one of the earlier WIN-95 versions, and I never upgraded or added patches. I run Norton's crashguard and Zonealarm and Karenware PTCookie to keep most junk off.
Since I have the same problem free performance on that particular Win-95 with Cyrix P166 as I do on Win-2000(Athlon1.8G)at work, I am convinced that a small version of W-95 might be a very good idea for those people who only use their computer for email and for searching/buying on the internet.
Am I the only one who still used Win-95?
Has anyone not heard of QNX demo disks, ZipSlack, or the many pre-made Car MP3 linux distros?
People, it's not that hard! Why suffer with a non-pre-emptive, not protected-mode OS to do these common things?
Backwards compatibiltiy, and games, I can understand. A cool Win95 tiny system would be a great way to bootstrap an old DOS or DirectX game on a CD.
But for car MP3 players? I hope you like the music to crap out every so often, if you change tracks too quickly. You'd best be running CubePlayer with some kinda custom input controller if you want it to work predictably.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I find it rather interesting that nobody has yet mentioned litePC and their EOS product - they got Windows ME down to less than 32MB _with_ Internet Explorer. They also make 98lite, which lets you easily install stripped down, but fully functional builds of Win98 and ME. I hear ME is actually pretty good after "liteing" it. XPlite is still in progress.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
I'm both saddened and relieved to hear this. I never managed to get a stripped-down version of win95 onto a floppy. However, I did manage to get win31 on a single 1.44mb floppy, back in the day; (using a self-extracting rar archive that uncompressed to a RAM drive, of course) I even had sound support, via the PC Speaker Driver for win31, so it could go 'tada' on boot-up! ;)
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
but I have OS 8 running on my Sharp Zaurus. (thanks basilisk and xfree!)
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
They have taken the bridge and the firewall.
We have barred the ports, but cannot hold them for long.
The server shakes. Drums, drums in the deep.
We cannot get out. A shadow moves in the dark.
We cannot get out...
They are coming...
Tweet, tweet.
So, we now have a Windows OS small enough to fit on a 5 meg BIOS chip... *evil laughter*
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
Every other comment bitches about how there are no uses for this. I can think of one interesting application straight away.
USB pendrives are becomming cheaper and more popular. Most of them support booting. Copying a mini distro of windows 95 would be quite a useful feature - you pop your stick into any PC, and have your own customised GUI with a few programs you use regularly, programs you need to open documents stored on your pendrive preinstalled, etc.
Well of course, without the right cable, I would have said screw it and done it the same way as you. I'm a cheapass.
As far as not having windows systems around, well, I don't think you should need it. All you would need to do would be:
1.Put dos with interlnk on the laptop if it isn't there already
2.Boot your linux system with the cdrom drive to a DOS floppy with cdrom drivers and interserv.
3.Transfer your files across a nice parallel cable.
Parallel cable transfer should be 300kb per second I think.
Of course, if you don't have DOS stuff hanging around either, that's another reason to just say "screw it." I am assuming you did though, because what else would be on the laptop to start with?
I didn't crack down and buy one of those laptop HDD converters until two weeks ago when someone wanted me to recover gigs of data off of a toasted laptop that wouldn't boot for more than a few minutes at a time, so backup over network or cable was impossible. I had a quite old laptop, but due to it's age it couldn't understand the very large, very expensive, out-of-1-year-warranty laptop's HDD. The adaptor was my only choice really.
A word to the wise about those, they don't connect like you would normally think!!! The laptop HDD converter I got, the pins that were for power, were FARTHEST from the red-striped pin 1 on the desktop ide cable. The connector was NOT keyed in any way and it was possible to connect the adaptor to the laptop hard drive off by a whole column of pins so that you would be applying power to data pins!!!!!
I didn't want to let the magic smoke out of the disk, so I tested it first with the 600 meg hard drive from my old laptop. Still, I was very very nervous. I've caused people to lose data before, and it's not a good feeling at all. Thankfully, it all went just fine.