There used to be a much bigger scene around custom Windows installs and I hope it gets resurrected if/when the ability to create local accounts goes away. The desire for a tiny install is pretty niche at this point but I could see demand going up to preserve local accounts.
Or perhaps that won't be necessary because certain enterprise customers will insist on local accounts and it will be easier for pirates to just tap into that install path? One way or another, if/when local accounts go away I hope there's some option to work around it.
Reminds me of when I first started learning computers, there was a version of Windows 3.11 that fit on a single 1.4M floppy. Some of them fit even more stuff by uncompressing the floppy into a ramdisk.
You could even make your own, starting with the file manager from Windows 3.1 and some files from a Windows 95 CD (the installer for 95 ran a stripped down 3.1)
Slightly related: Back in 2005 Mark Russinovich (Now Azure CTO) managed to disable almost all services in Windows XP
https://web.archive.org/web/20060221142148/https://www.sysin...
Whats the barebones usable version of windows 7? Tiny7?
Is it just a minimal set of unmodified files and Windows will gracefully degradate to this? Or did he need to patch everything to be able to strip it down?
There is Recycle Bin and Folder icon. What a waste of space!
Will it still be able to run malware properly? :)
Windows 98 takes ~200Mb after a clean install Windows 95 takes ~50Mb after a clean install
What would be a use case for this? Or is it for the challenge?
Assuming that one could get a functional networking stack up, could running `sfc /scannow` fix all the missing pieces, similar to a netboot deployment of Linux?
That is even smaller than minimal versions of Windows XP:
https://archive.org/details/smallest-windows-xp-rtm-sp-0
I assume the minimal version of Windows XP still has components that were stripped out of this version of windows 7.
What's the smallest Linux distribution with a graphical desktop?
Pretty cool. Always wanted the old skool look back in more modern windows
Nice
Umm, I don't want to nitpick, but what's the purpose of releasing a hotpotch shell of an OS, that doesn't work in even basic functionality?!
Meanwhile Tiny7, Tiny10, Tiny11 entered the chatroom..
And though they are 10x+ bigger in size, they are still barebones Windows OS (without all the clutter that Micro$oft tends to overload on Windows releases these days; I am looking at you Mr.Copilot) that work well for most use cases.
I personally used Tiny11 to set up my home PC, it is compact and usable.
This is impressive and it also kind of demonstrates how bloated Windows really is. You can fit a ton more functionality into even 1MB.
From the thread [0] -
> This was more of a fun proof of concept rather than something usable. Virtually nothing can run due to critical missing files such as common dialog boxes and common controls.
[0]: https://x.com/XenoPanther/status/1983579460906487835?t=7jLSz...