Reader “xhargh” took great interested in the earlier reported story on OSNews that Windows95 can be shrunk down to under 5 MB. By using instructions from BOFH and others at irc://irc.xbetas.com/Micro95, he was able to shrink down Windows 98 until it’s under 4.5MB in size. Look here for sceenshot and filelist.
Does the 5mb include drivers for video/sound/network etc?
Is it using just generic vesa?
They don’t seem to appear in the micro95 txt file list…
I could imagine getting a Linux distro this small, as the drivers are much smaller, and you can compile just what you need, but I’m sure a working windows install needs more files…
Perhaps that’s a challenge. KDE+QT in less than 30mb anyone?
This is a linux that is 48 Mb and is a full linux, with web browser, email, aim, document maker, a web server, xmms i believe, and a pdf reader. It has everything you might need for a short time and fits onto a busness card cd (if you have seen one of them). It is a live cd and you can also install it to the hard drive.
Would this be beneficial to Bochs? I would think that you’ve got a lot of the cruft that makes Windows slower removed. Maybe this would make Bochs usable…?
Ok, so how useable is this? Can you then add the specific drivers for your system? Could you then install directx? could you add windows media player? will these subsystems work?
This is cool and all, but again, an OS is useless unless it can run software. Not that this isn’t a good academic challenge, or that his has to be usable, but its that much better if it is.
I have some older machines, and if I can get win98 down to this big, and then add DirectX9 and drivers, AND be able to play games, that would be really great.
does somebody know if it is possible to boot such a system from a USB-Memory stick?
I just added a small tutorial how to build your Nano98-system
well, DOS should fit onto the 512k and 1Mb caches of the latest CPUs. the way CPUs are racing ahead, soon this squished windows will run from on-die cashe!
If you want a really small usable OS, take a look at Contiki: http://dunkels.com/adam/contiki/ Smaller than 64 kilobytes in size and includes GUI, TCP/IP, web browser, web server, etc. It was quite recently ported to the x86, and the entire system should definately fit in the L1 cache even on an old 486 🙂
Anyone doing any experiments like this for Win2k/XP ?
Hello. I notice that this 98lite program from litepc is payware. Are there any free utilities or instructions available on how to do the same thing with Win98SE (ie remove IE)? I don’t want to actually buy a utility.
PS: 486s had L1 caches smaller than 64kb, but I know what you say
I was over at litepc.com(where this guy got the idea to use the win95 explorer, I thought of that too, but didn’t really care to try) the other day and noticed that they are working on a version of their great software for winXP/2K users… Allowing you to remove a number of componenets from the core OS…
They could probably give you a good idea of the low end of size reachable…
Personally I would be happy if I could just run 2K headless with all services and manage it remotely… but then it’s just another unix box(hmmm….)
Now if you could do this with XP, then I would be interested, get it down to under 256 MB would be good enough. XPlite didn’t let me get that far… But since 95 was done, now 98, it seems logical someone will try XP next. I sure hope so. That will definately make interesting reading.
Q
I would like to see an OS running in RAM with a Web Browser. I don’t care if it is M$ Windows or Linux. 256MB of RAM dead cheap now.
Does the 5mb include drivers for video/sound/network etc?
Is it using just generic vesa?
No all these “small-windows” projects run in real mode (safe mode) without drivers loaded. That’s why the screen shot has such a low resolution/color.
Performance in safe mode is also not great so overall this isn’t much use beyond rescue/recovery purposes.
Quick addendum : it’s just standard vga that’s used by the display (forgot to mention that)
Hi, Congrats!
I jus wanna know does this make the system a little faster in aspect, with regards to:
Booting
GUI User/Interface Response
anything else?
Could an XPlite with Norton anti-virus run from a CD? Are there any great ways to do a clean boot and virus scan an NTFS drive?
…you use progman.exe as your shell instead of explorer.exe.
When I saw 95 in 4 meg I started working on NT. So far it’s down to 48 meg (from 123). I haven’t compressed any dlls yet. Nor does it give any error messages. I don’t think it will be to hard to get it to 20-25 and still be usable.
Uh… are you aware of the multiple linux live-cd projects?
Most famous (and with good reason) is Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.net). Burn the cd, stick it into the reader, boot.
In 2-5 minutes you get a full system running, with all hardware autoconfigured (including audio, tvcard, cd-burner, etc), GUI (KDE 3.1), and oh… 2 Gigabytes of software!
It uses a compressed filesystem to do the trick of 2gigs of data on a 700MB cd ^__^
And now there are also stripped down and modified versions booting from USB keychain drives ^__^
Have fun, Renato
BTW,
I run WinPE everyday with a ramdisk and web browser, all from a live CD.
I also use knoppix and Morphix
I think purchasing a Palm or Pocket PC is the solution 🙂
There’s something similar to what you suggest. It’s called avast! BART CD:
http://www.avast.com/i_idt_154.html
gndzer0
Seriously, if I needed a good GUI that was capable of running alot of Apps that I might need (Database, Spreadsheet, Word Processor on the fly and I didn’t have access to a laptop etc) I’d make a boot disk with an emulated OS on it like PacifiST running Atari ST etc.
Minimal DOS boot, PacifiST, Rom Image and a few Atari Apps
in less then 1 meg
.. Any saving needed requires floppy access of course 
Anyway, to me this sounds like a far better deal then having to fight Windows safe-mode and programs not designed to run in that small screen resolution
I knew someday my 5mb floppy’s would come in handy!!
It’s actually not running in safe mode, it’s running in normal mode. But still 16 colors in 640×480 because of standard vga-driver.
It’s actually not running in safe mode, it’s running in normal mode. But still 16 colors in 640×480 because of standard vga-driver.
With it’s modified registry and win.ini it gets all the characteristics of safe mode. Really what is still the difference?
Try QNX last time i tried it fitts in a 1.44MB Floppy & runs from RAM. Now on my new machine there is no floppy drive (got optical mouse instaed
) so check it out