5 replies to this topic

[KenO]

Would like to build the smallest, fastest Win or Alternative for Solitaire and other small apps.

1st some history, a long long time ago did some builds of Politalk Emergency Windows 95 http://www.geocities...in95/ramwin.htm

Recently have done some searching concerning alternatives for basic Windows Apps and have found Reactos http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html HX DOS Extender http://www.japheth.de/HX.html and Win GUI for Super DOS 7.10 by Wengier Wu.

Am interested in any and all suggestions.

Thanks

Ken

[KenO]

Did some more searching and found Micro95 and Nano98 so there are a lot of small installs out there.

While they all are fast compared to Bloated Windows am wondering if anyone on the forum has tested them for speed on games etc?

Ken

[was_jaclaz]

If I may, you seem to be missing some general points about "speed" and what affects it.

"Operating speed" is, depending on the type of application you need to use, affected by several factors:
1. Processor speed
2. Amount of RAM
3. Graphic card capabilities (and performance of it's drivers and/or rendering engine)
4. Hard disk access, read and write speed
5. Amount of unneded components of the OS loaded/running (STRICTLY connected to 1. and 2. above)
6. Efficiency (speed) of the OS

Reducing the installed components (and the loaded ones) ONLY affects speed of initial booting, while reducing "background" apps or unneeded running "services" will affect sensibly also point 5. above, but if you have enough resources (1. and 2.) difference in speed won't be much.

In other words, there is NO direct positive effect on speed of a running app derived from reducing the size of installed files, while there might be, in case of limited resources, an effect if you avoid to LOAD them (if unneeded) or use less "resource hungry" system files.

This is mainly what 98lite and Wimimize project do, the reduced footprint of a Winimized install is a bonus, very useful for installing on small hard disks, multiboot CD's and the like, but the latter does not increase "operating speed", or at least not in an amount you can appreciate.

jaclaz

[MedEvil]

I like to add that also to use general drivers instead of specific drivers, may very much reduce size but causes usually a serious performance drop. In regards to games some good drivers a worth more than any possible system shrinking.

[FloKo84]

Would like to build the smallest, fastest Win or Alternative for Solitaire and other small apps.

If you really only wish to run simple apps like Solitaire, you might want to experiment with modifying the shell= line in system.ini.
Without Explorer you could safely do away with any registry and 95% of the files.
Furthermore, a batch script could write system.ini from scratch each time, allowing you to start more apps from dos, one at a time.

An idea that i scrapped early on, after all what good is Windows if you remove multitasking.

Anyway if youre interested, this file list is a good place to start, with some adaptions.

Take care,
Flo

[Brito]

Hi,

I'd recomend you reactOS - the liveCD version is also lite and includes solitaire as well.

Under winbuilder you find it as project where you can re-build the ISO as many times needed.





A few other games also run good enough and it's a free OS..

http://www.reactos.o...creenshots.html