News Stripped Down Windows 11 OS Runs on 200 MB of RAM

[Admin]

Windows 11 may seem to be rather bloated, but tiny11 cuts away the fat and has enabled systems to boot with less than 200 MB of RAM available.

Stripped Down Windows 11 OS Runs on 200 MB of RAM : Read more

 

[-Fran-]

Uh... Virtual Memory at work as intended?

Am I missing something???

Regards.

 

[USAFRet]

Uh... Virtual Memory at work as intended?

Am I missing something???

Regards.

And even funnier, it is running in a VM.
Not on the native bare metal.

OK as a proof of concept and waving the epeen, but what could this possibly be used for?

 

[Deleted member 1353997]

Just bragging rights, I suppose. With how heavily the pagefile.sys will be needed, you can't really do anything useful with this.

 

[Giroro]

After hearing that the Tiny11 developers know what an OS is supposed to do, Microsoft ordered that the entire team be moved off of Windows 11 development and over to Azure... despite the fact that none of them are actually Microsoft Employees.

 

[Friesiansam]

And even funnier, it is running in a VM.
Not on the native bare metal.

OK as a proof of concept and waving the epeen, but what could this possibly be used for?

For fun, presumably.

 

[truerock]

I have a 10 year old PC running Windows 10 that I would like to upgrade to Windows 11. There are some OneDrive technologies rolling out on Windows 11 that will not be on Windows 10 that I am working with.

All of Windows 11 PCs we have are currently Windows365 virtual PCs to support remote workers.

Tiny11 would be great for that... but, it sounds like Microsoft is not supporting Tiny 11 as an official product version for non-commercial PCs.

I remember building servers for a datacenter using a version of Windows Server 2008 that was an extreme strip-down of the OS. It was headless... it didn't have a Windows desktop GUI... and we ran them using command prompts over Ethernet and RDP which just presented a command prompt.
**
Now I just remembered what that was all about.

The basic idea was to increase the security of the servers by stripping out everything that the servers didn't need to boot up. Then you would install just the apps that were needed to perform its function - like SQL Server for example. The idea was to eliminate as many possible security points of weakness by just having less unneeded software running on the server. The servers booted up with a completely closed firewall except for one non-standard port that could not be sniffed.

 

[YouFilthyHippo]

This is only legit if pagefile is disabled. 384 physical, there could be 8GB in pagefile in use for all we know for everything else. If it can truly run on 384GB, disable pagefile and let's see

 

[bigdragon]

I wish projects like Tiny 11 were official things embraced by OS vendors. Windows has entirely way too much bloat. I'm always annoyed by how ridiculously fast older versions of Windows and other OS distributions are compared to newer ones. Modern hardware can make everything so much better if there wasn't so much crap hogging resources.

 

[Math Geek]

I wish projects like Tiny 11 were official things embraced by OS vendors. Windows has entirely way too much bloat. I'm always annoyed by how ridiculously fast older versions of Windows and other OS distributions are compared to newer ones. Modern hardware can make everything so much better if there wasn't so much crap hogging resources.

to support it officially, means to offer tech support. i have always loved such projects but for anyone to attempt to support what this 3rd party has created would be a nightmare. MS of course won't as they put all that bloat in there for a reason. if they felt like removing it, they could easily make it happen from within their own release. but there is too much money to be made with all the data mining and ads all that bloat brings in.

feel free to use it, but know you are on your own if it starts messing things up. who knows what they really removed/disabled to get where it is. i love it and intend to play around with it, but if you are not comfortable troubleshooting on your own, then this is not for you. it may work for a daily driver OS, but you'll only know that once you give it a shot.

 

[derekullo]

640K ought to be enough for anybody

 

[USAFRet]

Tiny11 would be great for that... but, it sounds like Microsoft is not supporting Tiny 11 as an official product version for non-commercial PCs.

This is strictly a hobby project, for bragging rights.

 

[compprob237]

terribly slow, but it works

The entire reason the OS runs poorly is because most of the used memory is in the page file.

Now, the <200MB RAM is interesting in that it shows the absolute bare minimum the OS needs for important kernel-necessary files that absolutely must be in memory.

 

[Rokinamerica]

You could use this as a replacement for Pi to show you your temps and such....haha. Or get a Pi and make the pc useable.

 

[sfjuocekr]

This VM is just paging to and from disk instead of keeping everything in memory, can not recommend.

 

[eye4bear]

It is live proof that Windows is totally full of bloat, so I can see MS not being happy. My full install Linux KDE distro normally runs using only 900 megabytes of memory with no programs opened that are not started at boot. So this COULD BE DONE officially by MS, but as somone has already mentioned, they make way too much money on all the data in that bloat.

 

[Nikolay Mihaylov]

Just bragging rights, I suppose. With how heavily the pagefile.sys will be needed, you can't really do anything useful with this.

Yeah, but what if you create a RAM disk on the VM host to use as the paging device in the VM, eh?

 

[Findecanor]

Windows 95 had been made to run on 4 MB.