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Slimming Down Windows 3.1/3.11 (2002)
- cable2600 3y agoI remember using Double Space to compress a 1.44M floppy to run Windows 3.1 on it. I forgot how I did it, nice to see this website document it. Companies still use Windows 3.X because of old software written for it that they don't have the source code for it anymore.
- mschuster91 3y ago> Companies still use Windows 3.X because of old software written for it that they don't have the source code for it anymore. Yup, a particularly funny case was just recently the German Railways and/or their vendor Siemens... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39286206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39286206
- p0w3n3d 3y agodouble space was nice unless you had anything that's been already compressed. I hated when it showed me 450MB of disk space (I had 160MB HDD), but then after installing Warcraft 2 it took 160 of my free space instead of 50MB (don't remember real figures, however war2 had already compressed files and it was shown in Norton Commander as "size: (let's say) 50MB, occupied: 160MB"
- M95D 3y agoRemaining disk space was estimated using a compression ratio of 2.0 by default, but you could change the default, at least in Win9x. I don't know why it showed you 450MB on a 160MB HDD. You probably already changed it to 3.0 or higher. I used a drivespace volume for a very very very long time, even when I had 80 GB HDDs, because it made it SO EASY to back up the entire windows installation - just copy the file.
- chungy 3y agoDriveSpace was only ever available on FAT12 and FAT16 volumes. It seems like it'd be more annoying than anything for drives where FAT32 would be desirable.
- M95D 3y agoNot really. I had (and still have and use today) a 2GB FAT16 partition with ~1 GB for DOS utilities, Win98 setup kit from the CD and various windows programs that didn't need to be installed. The remaining ~1 GB was the drivespace volume with 2 GB space inside (maximum) for Windows 98 and the rest of programs that needed to be installed to run. It was enough space for Office 97, Corel Draw 8, Adobe Acrobat 5, and many many small programs. Games are in a different partition.
- cesarb 3y agoI vaguely recall that the default was to use the current average compression for the default estimation. I always changed it to 1, which is much saner: instead of being surprised that you didn't have enough disk space to store something, you'd at most get surprised that you had more space left over than you expected after storing something. Even today, things like the transparent compression in btrfs use 1 as the compression ratio for the free space estimate (though its metadata usage can be a bit unpredictable).
- M95D 3y ago> I vaguely recall that the default was to use the current average compression for the default estimation. No, at that time software didn't do anything by itself.
- badgersnake 3y agoIt got renamed to Drivespace in 6.2 didn’t it? Presumably because ‘double’ was a bit optimistic.
- pjmlp 3y agoBecause of a lawsuit, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics DriverSpace was the new version after the lawsuit was settled.
- baal80spam 3y ago> I don't know if Doublespace will work on a 286 computer I know for a fact that it WILL work :)
- M95D 3y agoBadly. Because (1) CPU and (2) dblspace.bin takes ~70K of conventional memory. IIRC, on a 286 it can't be loaded high, or at least not with EMM386 from back then.
- baal80spam 3y agoTrue, but if you just want that extra space it does its job. It made my 40MB hard drive store ~70MB of data which was a godsend back in the day!
- fsiefken 3y agoAppearently QEMM QRAM can do it on 286 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=71533 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=71533
- Sesse__ 3y agoI ran DriveSpace on an 8088. For several years. Was too young to notice the slowness, I guess.
- p0w3n3d 3y agoMeanwhile in 2024: npm i
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
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- edward28 3y agoSlimming down windows 11. Step 1: you don't.
- accrual 3y agoThere is Tiny11 for those wanting to try a custom stripped down version of Windows 11. Never tried it myself, though I was a fan of nLite back in the day. [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tiny11-23h2-windows-released-with-greater-functionality-numerous-bugfixes https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tiny11-23h2-windows-releas...
- gpvos 3y agoA swap file on a RAM disk seems... not useful.
- M95D 3y agoDepends on the system. I still use a ramdisk on my DOS/Win31/Win98 machine. It has lots of memory and Win98 crashes with more than ~768 MB RAM. I use the ramdisk to occupy excess memory.
- actionfromafar 3y agoBack in the dark ages I put swap on most of the graphics memory of an AGP bus graphics card. The read spead was slow compared to system RAM but insanely fast compared to swapping to HDD. Then put the graphics card as the highest priority swap so it swapped there before going to HDD.
- M95D 3y agoHow did you do that?
- actionfromafar 3y agoI don't remember, specifically I don't remember if I had to compile a tiny device driver to expose a chunk of RAM as a block device. In that case, it might have been something like this sample: https://www.opensourceforu.com/2012/02/device-drivers-disk-on-ram-block-drivers/ https://www.opensourceforu.com/2012/02/device-drivers-disk-o... There might also have been some way to convince the kernel a piece of RAM was a block device. The "ramdisk.c" driver in Linux was simpler before. After that, it was a matter of creating an init script which formatted the block device as a swap device, then running swapon.
- compsciphd 3y agoaround the same time, I fit linux with many of the common ethernet drivers, X + rdesktop and vnc clients + a little utility to launch them to a list of sites on a single floppy.
- HeckFeck 3y agoSeems like the sort of page that should've been linked from oldfiles.org, a long lost directory/webring of DOS, bootdisk stuffing and Windows 3.x sites: https://web.archive.org/web/20090120233733/http://oldfiles.org.uk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090120233733/http://oldfiles.o... The site is now gone, but at least it isn't a SEO spamming blog.
- fsiefken 3y agoTwo floppies? In 1995 I got Windows 3.1 down to 1 floppy in order to boot a library catalogue computer into a Write.exe so I could do wysiwyg word processing. All the Wordperfect 5.1 machines were used and as few used a catalogue computer only for a short while I thought I should just do it - I used the software "2MF 3.0" which formatted the 1.44 to the highest density of 2M, booted into DOS, with autoexec.bat a ramdisk was created and the WIN.UC2 self-extracted itself. Decades later I am happy to work at the same university in IT. I made a similar floppy setup to boot into CIV1 and a floppy to read the complete bible, and a floppy to listen to mod's. One floppy for single tasking computing, life was good.
- kungreke 3y agoI love this idea. I wish there was some kind of 2024 equivalent to doing this. Maybe a rewritable optical media of some sort. Sony really should have brought the minidisc to the pc as a floppy and cd/dvd rom replacement.
- ville 3y agoUSB sticks should work for this purpose. Rewritable, smaller and faster than optical media.
- fuzzfactor 3y agoStarted doing this when the first USB sticks became available. Even in Windows 95, which didn't support USB at the time. Interestingly W95 could be trimmed down to about 35mb, and carefully adding Word & Excel from Office97 was about another 65mb, so it ended up fitting if you had one of the huge 128mb USB sticks. That's about the smallest I can figure you can get a 32-bit Windows office machine which would be "fully compatible" with the latest Windows & Office versions, as long as you were carefully storing your office files on a FAT32 partition and limiting your expectations (like file size and number of XL rows) to those addressed by W95 which was as functional an office machine as millions of people need today. For those of you who did manage to run W95 at its full 2GHz maximum over 10 years later on much higher speed motherboards than there were in the 1990's, you know what I'm talking about when I say the most noticeable thing is zero latency in almost all human-computer interactions. You could be doing all kinds of office work, with lots of other things to "boot". Just got a couple more of the "small" 128GB SATA SSD that are finally cheap enough for bootable OS's to use like "game cartridges" now. Not much different "application", just faster booting and operation than most USB. Two partitions on each SSD, one for an OS only, one for ALL related storage. Still have some massive multibooting going on, but with these lttle SSDs the most up-to-date are going to be W11, W10x86, W10x64, Debian, Mint & Fedora. Fortunately I got a few of the pre-NUC cheap ASUS miniPC that has a simple hatch on top and came with a full size SATA Desktop HDD right there. Gets even better ventilation and has no exposed electronics when the cover is off all the time, remove the HDD (for good now) and just slip in whichever SSD you feel like booting to at the time. Looks like about 128GB will do what 128mb would do back in the day.
- livrem 3y agoI have a 1.44 MB floppy here somewhere that boots MS-DOS with Windows 1.01. I do not remember if I even had to do anything special to fit that on a single bootable floppy. Probably not. From the first item I find on archive.org it looks like Windows 1.0 was distributed on four 360 kB floppies.
- drewzero1 3y agoI had Windows 1.01 and 2.03 on boot floppies, they were both small enough to just copy the files into a DOS bootdisk and fit fine. However in my experience most of the programs that I wanted to run in Windows that wouldn't run in DOS required at least Windows 3.x to work.
- kotaKat 3y agoThere was also the commercial products going into the 9x era - 98lite still surprisingly exists. https://www.litepc.com/98lite.html https://www.litepc.com/98lite.html
- fsiefken 3y agoWith 98lite or 98micro and kernelex you could run firefox 52 (2017) and java8, but you need more then 1 floppy.
- magicalhippo 3y agoRecall a project back in the days where the customer wanted to upgrade their workstations but also save money, so we designed a solution where they'd have a beefy NT4-based Citrix server and reusing their 486 desktop machines by running the RDP client on Windows 3.11. To make deployment easy and smooth, it was decided to use network booting and running Windows from a RAM disk. The machines had 8MB of memory and it was found we needed 4MB for Windows to be happy, so we had a 4MB RAM disk to squeeze everything into. A colleague spent a lot of time slimming Windows down, but got stuck on the printer drivers. They had 4-5 different HP printers which required different drivers, and including all of them took way too much space. He came to me and asked if I had some solution, and after some back and forth we found that we could reliably detect which printer was connected by scanning for various strings in the BIOS memory area. While not hired as a programmer, I had several years experience by then, so I whipped up a tiny executable which scanned the BIOS for a given string. He then used that in the autoexec.bat file to selectively copy the correct printer driver. Project rolled out to thousands of users across several hundred locations (one server per location) without a hitch, and worked quite well from what I recall.
- brnt 3y agoAnd here I am, in a shop of about 3K FTE, where we are squeezed 6 persons onto a single socket Xeon which barely beats an iPhone 15 Pro rendering those 12 screen worth of data slowing down to a crawl, huge latency, crappy disk latency too (feels like were all on the same spinning Rust, but it's Windows and some VMWare middleware so who knows why this is slow). Somehow snappyness is completely eradicated.
- fuzzfactor 3y ago>Somehow snappyness is completely eradicated. Barely inadequate engineering by design. Actually that's a difficult target to hit accurately and there's a fine line between it and barely adequate engineering leadership. And even if it's adequate, is barely adequate what you wanted anyway?
- n6h6 3y agoBeautiful work
- fleeno 3y agoI recently slimmed down Windows 3.0 to run it from a 1MB SRAM card on a MS-DOS 5.0 palmtop. I just did it by trial and error, and I think I can slim it down further from this guide, though they're using Double Space, which I won't have. I'm always sort of amazed how well Windows 3.x runs on hardware that would have been a bit old even when 3.0 was released.
- rickcarlino 3y agoI would love to read a write up or see photos of this.
- narag 3y agoSomehow related: I used to run both 3.11 and 95 over the same DOS 5 (?) installation. It's a less known fact that, although Windows 95 ran in protected mode, it was started as a DOS real-mode program before switching modes and, when it was run from a DOS command line, it shut down back to the DOS prompt, so I could run both Windows versions without completely rebooting. It was useful because at the time I was programming versions of the same program for both systems. That means that Windows 3 was compatible with the newer DOS version that came underneath 95. If someone still has the software and wants to test it, IIRC the only thing needed was to edit autoexec.bat and have different directories for every Windows.
- hapless 3y agoMicrosoft used to sell Windows as a runtime. Like, you would ship Windows on floppy disks as part of your software product for end-users. 16 bit Windows was consciously designed, intentionally made modular, to accomplish things like this. Albeit the author was surely not the intended customer!
- Lammy 3y agoWas that also used for the Windows 95/98 graphical installers? The widgets always had that Windows 3 look to them.
- nandhp 3y agoSomething like it! Setup for Windows 95 through Windows ME, when run from DOS, unpacked and launched a version of Windows 3.1 that was included in the MINI.CAB file.
- Lammy 3y agoI love how another page of this site uses HTML tables to simulate the Windows 3.11 Setup screens: http://www.geocities.ws/politalk/win31/multmode.htm http://www.geocities.ws/politalk/win31/multmode.htm