Wonder who made that claim that window 10 is lighter?

Going back to the days when window 95 run on our old 32mb ram computer like a charm, I can see how "light" windows has been

Easy enough to get so little on a VM for testing...

Hmmm... I'd wonder how many services minimum are required for it to run properly. Windows XP came with like 90 services active out of the gate, most of which you didn't need. The crazy IO could be Virtual Memory, requested memory of an area without actually needing it all but swapping it still the same.

But just think of all the things we'll be missing, like transparent compression... oops, they removed drivespace compatibility... ummm... Themes (which I always turn off), plug & play (which 95 was featured as having), Intuitive interfaces (Oops, removed that with 8...), Ramdrives (came with dos and weak early 95 builds, not included anymore. Plus they were limited to 300k).

Hmmm.... Yeah definitely their definition of light is a bit skewed. You could run 95 actually on a little as 8Mb (not that you'd have the memory to do anything else). XP reserved 256MB for itself, Vista reserved a whole Gig, almost all of it for the graphical AERO interface that I had no interest in.

Are you guise cereal or what?

Huh? What does that even mean?

Are you guys serious?

Why are you even comparing a billion years old OS to a modern OS?

Simplicity of design and low footprint of used resources maybe? As i recall the actual win95 install directory was only like 100Mb.

And 20 years does not equate to a billion years... otherwise we'd have dissected it long ago... assuming copyright doesn't keep getting pushed back 20 years every 20 years.

If you want cold hearted comparisons, you can run the Linux kernel and minimum OS in something like 50Mb and only needing like 4Mb of ram. Compare that to any version of modern windows.

You can also run Server Core or Embedded without anything user-related included, but that doesn't make it a good choice either. There is so much optimisation, drivers, 20+ years of compatibility layers, security layers, self-maintenance processes, frameworks, 32-bit compatibility layers, attacks mitigation dead ends, and many other things that were simply not present during 95's time.

This is a silly comparison. And it is a billion years in terms of technology, not actual real-life years.

If it's not a good choice, then why have the choice there to begin with?

And Unix/Linux got it right early on back in the 80's and 90's. Great boost in confidence there...

Seriously though, 95/98 had some issues, but with internet/networking not really being widely accessible there were a few major problems with the OS.

1) No access controls. This includes no file locking.
All files were treated equally, and only a few flags hinted at a file's importance which you could override at any time. Unlike in a multi-user environment and Unix based systems where files and resources were monitored, windows... didn't...
2) The GUI
A GUI by itself isn't a horrible thing, but there was no effort put into the commandline, so people got used to using graphical programs and never having a clue on how to chain or pipe commands together to get more complex results. Seriously, commandline and piping is an old concept, and one of the best. Instead of a chain of commands to say, check spelling in your documents for errors, instead you'd only consider using something like say... M$ Office.
3) DLL's
DLL's in theory is a good thing, however it's when you started installing other software and replacing DLL's from different packages that the system became unstable. Worse there was no way to truly monitor or really install to local directories because everything wanted to be pushed into the system directory.
Things would have been much better if everything was statically linked and included in the EXE files. Yeah some programs would have been a little bigger, but the whole thing would have been more stable... Curiously they would have ran like DOS programs in that regard... heh...


As one of the first 32bit OS's (or layered on top of DOS) they had to start somewhere. Protected Mode was a new thing, and properly programmed it's a wonderful thing.

So i guess the real question is... Can we strip out all the extra crap and get a very tightly packed powerful kernel for Windows that doesn't require a gig to run? Are we allowed to customize the OS to our needs? I'm pretty sure i know the answer to that, and it's going to be a big fat no.

How much time are you willing to spend reading how to customize your OS? Here is a Windows7 installation running on 512MB RAM. Not sure if there is any such version for Win8 or Win10 yet, but assuming you do spend the time needed to learn how to do it, you can do some pretty neat customization on Windows.

Days, if it makes a difference. Unfortunately i can't tweak the sources where it counts.

I have an idea, an idea that would block unwanted programs quite easily. Unfortunately it requires a modification in the kernel and 1 byte of space in file entries per file... 2 actually when i think of default priorities as well.

Still even if i follow some tutorial(s), there's a lot of services i can't disable because it will make windows unstable. RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) as a prime example. Doesn't help they don't say what they rely on or what some of them really do; once fully disabled you can't enable it again or get it enabled again without a lot of fiddling and it's easier to reinstall than fix.

Since i've disabled themes, visual eye-candy, most unneeded services (printer spool, update, time, defender, media center crap, search, secondary logins, smart cards, font caches, etc), so i'm probably running it rather light-weight as is.

Well done, you've saved yourself 10 megabytes of memory.

-.-

So you're saying based on this: Windows 10 is (likely) really bad at resource management and will never be lightweight at all...

Thanks. Real boost of confidence...

Huh? /confused

I guess that Windows is beyond saving, then. :/

Yep, I remember fiddling a lot with my old Windows builds but didn't bother anymore at some point.
The same amount of time can be invested into learning a thing or two about Linux - or doing something non PC related.