How small can Windows after XP get?

Discuss Windows Vista/Server 2008 to Windows 10.
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LeonardoIannelliRETRIEVES
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How small can Windows after XP get?

Post by LeonardoIannelliRETRIEVES »

There's this video from 2009 where Windows XP is downsized a lot, with the Windows folder being as little as 26 MB in size.



This version of XP is quite broken and lacks major UI characteristics like the Luna theme, high-res icons, Tahoma font, and graphical boot screen.

I'm wondering how much Windows Vista and later can be downsized. People have tried downsizing Windows 7 and 10 before, but I'd like to know what the limit is. How would this look? Is it as broken as XP? What's the smallest it can be before you see major breakage? And can the process of downsizing be automated, maybe even before installing the OS? All questions I'd like to see answered.
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dixieLH
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Re: How small can Windows after XP get?

Post by dixieLH »

dunno about vista
but tiny7 was
ISO ~500 MB
install ~1 GB

AlphaBeta
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Re: How small can Windows after XP get?

Post by AlphaBeta »

It all depends on what functionality you want to preserve. If you don't want Explorer, then this could be brought down even lower.

The newly introduced Validation OS based on build 22621 goes down to about 500 MB and that also includes WoW64. WinPE is twice as large without WoW64.
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dixieLH
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Re: How small can Windows after XP get?

Post by dixieLH »

drivers themself and patches are biggest sizers
SxS can be manually filtered for barebones

Daghdha
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Re: How small can Windows after XP get?

Post by Daghdha »

Windows XP Embedded can reduced the footprint further. From a quick search, a command line only XP Embedded install will go down to 32MB. A simple GUI could get down to 128-256MB, depending on which options you choose.

Californium-252
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Re: How small can Windows after XP get?

Post by Californium-252 »

As an ISO file, Tiny10 (1809, x86) is 642 MB (and it has explorer.exe); ValidationOS build 22621.1 is 339 MB as an AMD64 compile, 287 MB as an ARM64 compile (and it has a basic GUI and command prompt), and there's a Windows 7 SuperNano out there that's 332 MB in size (and it has explorer.exe).
As an install, Tiny10 can be down to 1,2-1,3 GB if you remove the pagefile, use Disk Cleanup to remove unneccessary and put the archive attribute on files; Windows 7 SuperNano, with the same tricks as Tiny10 (mainly adding the archive attribute), can be down to just around 500 MB, although it has missing DLLs which leads to its compatible apps being mostly the same as Windows XP and Vista (without the Extended Kernel).
Here's a video on Windows 7 SuperNano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALB0ryp7waY
Here's the video on Tiny10 (1809, x86): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTXHU_9oNdM

dixieLH
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Re: How small can Windows after XP get?

Post by dixieLH »

the goal is to have small OS without losing functionality
these are not that

ZhengXiaoAi
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Re: How small can Windows after XP get?

Post by ZhengXiaoAi »

There's a Windows 7 image which is only 240 mb small.
I apologize for my grammatical error if it exists, because English is not my primary language.
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gahtenam2928
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Re: How small can Windows after XP get?

Post by gahtenam2928 »

ZhengXiaoAi wrote:
Thu Jun 30, 2022 7:00 am
There's a Windows 7 image which is only 240 mb small.
But does it lose any functionality?

dixieLH
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Re: How small can Windows after XP get?

Post by dixieLH »

ofc it does lol...

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