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Inside Windows XP Reduced Media Edition

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the don't-hold-your-breath dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Flexbeta.net has got it's take on Windows XP Reduced Media Edition, which is basically Windows XP Pro stripped of its Windows Media Player. To sum it up, there is hardly any noticable difference between XP RME and XP Pro, except for the welcome screen and Windows not recognizing their own file format. The article hints how this may be the beggining to a Windows OS without any Microsoft applications. Bye-bye Internet Explorer?"

9 of 605 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ok this is Bullsh!t by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative

    The point is that OEMs are now free to bundle a media player other than WMP, e.g. WinAMP or iTunes (or Joe's Hardware Store's Shiny Media Player Version 0.45BETA). The only people who will get an OS without a media player are the ones who bought the boxed version, who presumably know enough to install a media player (and if they don't, they really shouldn't be installing an OS).

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  2. Re:Performance improvement? by heffrey · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why would not having WMP improve performance? I mean, your average Linux distro comes with an order of magnitude more software than plain Windows and it doesn't cause problems. The presence of files on a disk doesn't make processes run slower.

  3. Re:Am I the only one who's happy about this? by Decaff · · Score: 4, Informative

    What issues do people have with WMP anyway? Don't people realise that WMP and IE are not "applications" but more like "services"?

    The point is that they WERE applications. They have been transformed into services for business reasons: in order to crowd out alternative application providers. In a monopoly, that is illegal.

    There was another way things could have happened. Microsoft could worked with suppliers of applications in order to develop an API for these services that both Microsoft and other companies could have written to. That way applications could target the 'standard HTML rendering API', and use IE or Mozilla as the engine. They could target the 'standard media playing API' and choose either WMP or Real.

    Removing these portions will severely affect third-party developers. Now, a zoom player download is increased from a couple of megs to well over 20. Genius.

    As for downloads, there is nothing to stop vendors supplying multiple media players on CD/DVD ready to install in the PC. This is the way it used to be with browsers.

  4. Re:What is the point?? by Fancia · · Score: 2, Informative

    According to the article, it doesn't prompt the user to download Media Player. Windows doesn't recognize the file either way, and Microsoft's site gives you a choice between Media Player and Winamp.

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  5. Windows without IE has been possible for a while by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I frequently remove IE from Win98 for customers using 98lite from http://litepc.com. I haven't tried the 2000/xp version.

  6. Re:What DRM? by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative

    "Other than the fact that the mere installation of the OS requires DRM, what DRM is there?"

    As far as I know, Windows XP activation doesn't seem to matter as much if, like most users, you buy your home PC pre-installed with an OEM OS from a major PC vendor or you buy your office PC with an OS under a corporate site license.

  7. Could this be the beggining... by PoprocksCk · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...of the end of proper spelling?

  8. Re:BLASPHEMY!!!!!! by riscthis · · Score: 2, Informative
    Microsoft can truly remove IE, it just doesn't want to because that would mean an end to proprietary extensions. There is no reason for the file search interface to be so dependent on IE other than anticompetitive practices.

    The thing is, IE is just a wrapper on top of a set of COM components that provide the HTML rendering etc. Removing the IE executable itself is (perhaps) not so much of an issue, but remove MSHTML.dll and the rest and you are likely to break a lot of third-party applications that embed it.

    As an example of how common this is, the GMail notifier clearly uses some of the IE COM components to communicate with GMail servers. Although I now use Firefox for web browsing, I have hardened the IE security settings the best I can, so it prompts me for most things. When the GMail notifier starts, I get an IE dialog box prompting me for login credentials to GMail...
  9. xplite by moosesocks · · Score: 3, Informative

    There's a product called XPLite which allows you to remove Windows Media Player, IE, and virtually any other component of XP without causing severe harm to the system. You can seriously remove ANY component: COM+, Active Directory, Indexing Service, DirectX, or even remove ALL of XP's networking services. Cool stuff.

    They've also got versions for win2k, ME (shudders), and 98. You can pull off a working 98SE installation in 41mb.

    I'm in no way affiliated with these guys. they just make a cool product that's very applicable to this topic

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