Eric Traut, one of the head Operating System designers at Microsoft, recently demonstrated MinWin, an internal build of Windows 7 at the University of Illinois. The main talking point of the early demo was the fact that MinWin is far less demanding on your RAM and hard drive space, thus reducing the memory footprint of the future Windows OS.
ComputerWorld report Traut as saying:
“A lot of people think of Windows as this really large, bloated operating system, and that may be a fair characterization, I have to admit.”
“[So] we created what we call MinWin. It’s still bigger than I’d like it to be, but we’ve taken a shot at really stripping out all of the layers above and making sure that we had a clean architectural layer there.”
Comparing it to the current Windows operating system really shows how much Microsoft have tried to reduce the bloat. While Vista uses 5,000 files for its 4GB core, MinWin is just 100 files and takes up only 25MB.
Obviously this will be scaled up considerably over the next three years as Windows 7 is built around the system core. MinWin will be used as the basis of all upcoming versions of Windows, and the fact that Microsoft have seemingly put so much effort in to minimising the size and scale of the stripped down version, I’m quite hopeful this mindset will be followed through to the final products.
With the increasing popularity of Linux based operating systems such as Ubuntu, it’s imperative for Microsoft to try and give consumers what they want. As far as I can tell, that is a core operating system which while offering ease of use doesn’t force people to put up with the system bloat of programs and tools they may never use. Is this too much to expect when Windows 7 gets released in 2010?
You can see a video of the MinWin kernel on the University of Illinois video download site.
