[Halfmanhalfamazing]

This isn't the first time we've heard about the new slimmer windows. But apparently microsoft is going to try.

Microsoft, no longer the company of bloat? Now I know I'm in the twilight zone.

[ShadowAce]

[Still Thinking]

So, are they going to take out the DRM crap and leave in the ever-so-capable hands of the RIAA?

[Always Right]

Really just give me Windows 3.11 back. I really don’t care about the operating system, I just want to run applications.

[smith288]

I have the macbook with bootcamp and just installed Vista on it. It runs pretty well. Vista’s problem is that its meant pretty much for PCs running on steroids instead of 1ghz single processors with 512 ram.

Convincing people that it can run on that smoothly was a bad idea.

2gb or more is my recomendating if you want full performance.

[dayglored]

> ...MinWin's source code base takes up about 25 megabytes on disk, compared to about 4 gigabytes for Vista...

That can't be an apples-to-apples comparison. That's a factor of over 150-to-1. Not possible.

Even if MS took all their famously long variable names and chopped them down to 6 characters like Fortran, you couldn't get 150:1.

I suspect the 25MB Win7 number is just a bare kernel, whereas the 4GB Vista number must be everything including the applications that come with it.

[RayChuang88]

I think the reason why Microsoft would reduce the size of the code was that by specifically developing for the x86 and x86-64 platform only, they can highly optimize the code for smaller size and higher performance. It's possible that Windows XP and Windows Vista were using core OS code that could be ported to non-x86 CPU's such as the Intel Itanium CPU.

[zeugma]

I've a question for whoever out there might be unlucky enough to be burdened with the MS-Vista OS. Did Microsoft really remove the telnet program?

I've heard rumors to that effect, but would like confirmation. 

Granted, without a really good reason to use it on a completely isolated network, anyone who runs a telnet daemon deserves to be strung up over a vat of boiling oil and slowly lowered into it. That doesn't make telnet any less of a multifunction battleclub from a troubleshooting perspective.

[Egon]

Microsoft, no longer the company of bloat? Now I know I'm in the twilight zone.

Maybe MinWin is a new Linux distribution.

[tacticalogic]

This isn't the first time we've heard about the new slimmer windows. But apparently microsoft is going to try. Microsoft, no longer the company of bloat? Now I know I'm in the twilight zone.

Check out Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn) Server Core installation.