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Comment by azalemeth | Hacker News Reader

In the days when Windows was easier to crack, it was not uncommon to find very small, specialised ISOs of "miniature windows" designed specifically for running a certain task -- typically some form of data-recovery app, system repair/maintenance or similar -- and they would fit on a single CD-R, have almost no system requirements, and, if I recall successfully, be bloody useful to my school's computer administrators who otherwise just had to reimage machines all the time with Norton Ghost.

Nowadays it seems that a Windows ISO does not come up short of 4 GB and this tradition of "repacking" them into small, optimised, crap-free operating systems (albeit of questionable legality, but inevitably used on a machine that had a real windows license!) has been lost. I lament this.

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When I was in high school, I had a specialized CD like this. The computers in our labs were configured to prevent us from running arbitrary programs, but they weren't configured to prevent booting from a CD.

I created a stripped down Windows 95 live CD that had the default shell replaced by StarCraft. I could sit down at a machine, insert my CD, reboot, and the machine would boot directly into SC.

Hehe, neat! I remember doing something similar, albeit once accidentally. Instead of changing the shell (e.g. to LiteStep), I forced an old DOS game to be executed before windows. Exiting the game would result in shutting down the PC.

I was terrified that I removed my OS and replaced it with a shareware point and click adventure game.

It was a great learning experience though (esp. for my German: https://moorhuhn.fandom.com/de/wiki/Dunkle_Schatten)

I remember running Winamp in the background along with various games (Diablo, Age of Empires, Red Alert). They would always lag terribly.. but not if you didn't log in first!

win+R before login was pretty useful - albeit insecure!

Happy times. With single-digit RAM, every megabyte counts!

Tangential, but I installed Longhorn on a high school computer without considering the implications. I saw another student casually using it a few weeks later like it was nothing special. Out of morbid curiosity, I would have loved to see the technician who came to fix it.

Wonderful to see Longhorn mentioned. This defined my middle school tinkering days, and eventually got me into other OSes like Linux.

This is so meta! In all that time, SC (1&2) to this day continues to evolve the metagame around efficient build orders: what can I do to throw a punch at my opponent sooner than they can expect. If we could start our matches from the BIOS POST rather than the in-game 0:00, I guess you'd have a pretty strong timing push ;)

There used to be a hacked version of Windows 3.1 in the early '90s that fit on a 3.5" floppy (I think it was called Windows Lite), and it was extremely stripped down. The use case was that it could launch Write.exe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Write), which let you present formatted materials onscreen similar to Word, so it acted sort of like a light-weight alternative to PowerPoint. Anytime I had to present on someone else's machine, I would use it to ensure things would work.

(Write.exe is still present in Windows 10, and redirects to WordPad, which replaced Write.exe in Windows 95.)

those were seemingly easy to make, kernel.exe gdi.exe user.exe some drivers and ONE FONT.. lol maybe one program. its been a while but it was 'neat'.

With Windows being componentized, this is often a lot easier than it used to be - there's official minimal editions like the forgotten Nano Server (or an attempt at remaking it like remin-core: https://github.com/replisys/remin-core), IoT, Factory OS and whatnot, but even adding the legacy GUI subsystem you can get somewhat small when building Windows PE variants like used for the default setup/recovery images.

At least a few years ago some of this trend was still alive making little PE images that could almost be used for real desktop use on sites like reboot.pro and other spin-offs, though it seems to be a lot less mainstream than the piracy heydays during the XP era.

Factory OS is pretty interesting because it can run any Win32 app (outside of a hypervisor) via a container, something you couldn’t do with WinPE as often there were too many libraries missing to get something like Chrome running.

I wonder if they’ll ever use it to replace WinPE. They’ve had the same installer since Vista, and it probably needs a redo (it still takes forever to install Windows).

Hiren's boot CD use to have both live Mini XP and Mini Windows 98 for all kind of diagnostics and running the repair tools. Back then it was mostly data recovery, bad sector and some password breaking tools.

They created WinPE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Enviro...) for this purpose. The full Windows "desktop experience" is not that well suited for this sort of stuff anyway.

There were legal Linux distros that had similiar repair tools (e.g. Damn Small Linux) and fit on a 50mb business card sized CD-R. Useful to keep in your wallet before the days of USB sticks.

It's still possible to customize .wim images and have post-install scripts to declutter stuff but straying from standardized edition components can cause future updates to lead to a corrupted state, which was the case with windows xp as well. It's just not a large enough use case to warrant support.

For repair/maintenance, there is WinPE (and now, live USB boot)

These convenient Windows builds on torrent sites can be compromised with keyloggers, preconfigured remote desktop backdoors and crypto stealing packages now :(

It is interesting how the use of these underground builds are prevalent enough to be worthwhile to compromise

On reflection those random downloads altruistically shared back in the day by passionate geeks on otherwise sketchy-looking sites were never as harmful to me as the user-hostile, telemetry-sucking, ad-filled crap clogging up the modern appstore.

I tried WinReducer on Windows 10 recently; it didn't reduce the ISO size by much, but it did successfully remove pre-installed apps and services that serve no useful purpose (like telemetry, legacy server features, etc.). Went with a fine-toothed comb through the task scheduler afterwards and managed to get down to a pretty snappy Win10 install that quickly boots to the desktop with 1.8Gb RAM usage (as opposed to the 2.5Gb RAM I see on a regular Win10 install on the same machine).

Don't use its defaults though; it'll remove Microsoft Account login and Store (which I wanted because I have Game Pass for the kids).

I made one of these for when I was a repair technician at a computer shop. They used WinPE, which is the same sort-of-Windows environment that installers run.

UBCD4Win was the toolkit I used. It had all my virus scanners, data recovery apps, pretty much everything I could ever need on there. Like a Linux live CD but with Windows. Shit was brilliant!

Windows still does WinPE, but I think that is limited to OEMs and other fancy Microsoft-licensed corpos.

There are still builds out there, but honestly 4gb isn't much when the thumbdrives are so cheap now. Still blows my mind how cheap they are!

I found this same hacker spirit in the FOSS world. Windows just struggles so much to be independent from its user, that I realized that I have to give up. I hope that many did the same and now nurture their talent where at least they don't have to swim dead against the current.

I found this same hacker spirit in the FOSS world.

Unfortunately that "hacker spirit" seems to end at "must have the source code"; the same can't be said of those customising Windows and such, who definitely didn't have the source but succeeded nonetheless.

How do you mean? Not enough hacker spirit in the FOSS world?

I meant that they seem lost without source[1], while the Windows hackers don't need source.

[1] I remember someone being very surprised that I patched the binary of a FOSS application, instead of changing the source and compiling it --- the former took a few minutes, the latter would've taken far more time (to get all the dependencies, build system, etc.) and possibly introduced other unwanted changes.

I think most people just don't want to see their effort lost to time.

Patching a binary is impressive, sure, but it's the polar opposite of sustainable. You don't have a good way to document your fix, it's dependent on one exact source tree and how the compiler was feeling that morning, and even minor changes from upstream can completely change the way a binary patch would need to work.

It's great for a one-off hack, but part of the appeal of open source for many people is how easy it is for your changes to become part of the "permanent record" of that piece of software.

I like your argument about sustainability. With proper free software, the code itself is part of the product. When you're left to work on a binary, it's not even not guaranteed that your patch won't work with the next version or whatever - often the authors specifically make the life of the modders harder. It's part of the product that you don't get to modify it. It's signed, obfuscated, there's checks for integrity, uglified, ABI modifications for the sake of breaking compatibility. So much of the effort is just fighthing against that, and that's a directly opposing sustainability.

I don't think this argument holds much substance. FOSS developers are absolutely not lost without the source - they just share the fruit of their labor under FOSS licenses. In fact there's a good chunk of work being done black-box style: WINE, many of the drivers, game modding, hell here's a random FOSS binary patcher[0]. So FOSS developers don't seem to be lost without the source.

[0] https://github.com/secretsquirrel/the-backdoor-factory

I remember some (pirated) Windows XP versions that were minimized as well - with some being under 300 MB.

https://archive.org/details/MicroXP0.82

This was the way back in the early 2000s. We also had auto boot USB keys that upon boot would format the main drive and start listening for the Ghost server to send a command to image the drive. I was often amazed at how quickly you could format an entire computer lab.

I wonder why they would repackage a Windows ISO rather than a Linux one. My bet is the software that is in these ISO's only runs on Windows? Otherwise it would seem that a Linux distro would be the perfect candidate for something like this.

You have to understand that the state of Linux in the early 90s wasn't what it is today. Partitioning/reading/fixing a FAT16/FAT32 disk from Linux was perilous, if even possible....

You could also do a slipstream build and make a windows iso that had all your programs and drivers pre-installed. It was very handy in the days when windows seemed to require reinstalling every few months.

A CD is 650mb. You could get them a lot smaller than that. That’s bigger than the full size one f win 98.

It’s the successor of Windows 95 which you could get on floppies.

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