Last Updated on April 14, 2017 by Dave Farquhar
There seems to be a competition to see how small one can make Windows 9x and have it still boot into a GUI. The latest salvo in this war reduces Win98SE to under 5 megs.
People brag about how fast Windows runs when you do this. Well, yeah! Look at the file listing and the most crowded directory is 28 entries. I’ve seen 1,000+ files in C:\Windows at times. Since FAT is very efficient when dealing with small numbers of files (MS themselves said in the DOS 5 manual to never put more than 100 files in a directory) but inefficient when not, it’s no wonder to me that Windows, cut down this much, can boot in seconds. A computer’s disk is its biggest bottleneck, and the FAT filesystem doesn’t help.
The only problem is, as far as I can tell, Windows cut this small has no networking capabilities or anything else interesting besides a GUI. Which raises the question: Whatcha gonna do with it now? These days, an OS without Internet connectivity and some means to print isn’t very useful to anyone. I know that eliminates two of the three reasons I wanted a computer in the first place.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
Where i work, we get demo machines for customer demonstrations.
They are intel P4, and come with 98se for some reason (lowest common demoninator?) and they re-start windows in about 8 seconds, it is soooo sweet.
Still, I have an old 486 (640k) laptop running dos (great for old games) and it re-starts in about 8 seconds.
not sure what this means, probably the hardware guys are smarter thant he software people..
Jimbo
OT, but Win related:
Did you hear about the anti-blaster worm, that eradicates blaster in infected computers, installs the windows patch, and sends itself on? Is that for real, or a geek joke? Wonder what else it does.
I’ve got my objections to even a helpful worm, and do Windows upgrades manually rather that turn Microsoft loose to auto-install updates at their convenience. But I realize there’s lots of users out there who don’t have the foggiest…
And we’ve exchanged a couple notes before–note my new address.