Would A Lightweight Microsoft Windows Version For Older Hardware Be A Good Idea?
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Mike Johnson
Mike Johnson is a writer for The Redmond Cloud - the most comprehensive source of news and information about Microsoft Azure and the Microsoft Cloud. He enjoys writing about Azure Security, IOT and the Blockchain.
you could always use windows 7 tiny 7 it is about 700MB and just over 1GB installed.
Thanks for the suggestion. May have to check it out!
I’m all for it!!! It is definitely good for me since I have one room in the house packed with old PC hardware. On the other hand, it may not be good for Linux distros and other open source alternatives. I am aware of some lean Windows version floating around the internet (e.g. a Win7 mod which was optimized to run games). Thus, releasing a lean Win8 and selling it at a cheaper price may end up as an advantage for MS. Some people running multiple PCs will most likely have some of the PCs running Linux distros or moded Windows. If MS gives them the opportunity to get a lean Win8 for say $10-20 (plus all the support and updates), I don’t see why they will stick with their distros/bottlegs instead of buying cheap Win8. Lean WIN is a WIN-WIN… a win for consumers and a WIN for MS, but not for MS hardware partners and Linux.
Honestly that is probably why it will never exist… MS doesn’t want to hurt it’s partners. Though to be honest, and not to offend Windows die-hards here, the primary reason I use Windows is for games/modern software… if you have older hardware you probably can’t use half the windows games and software anyway… so a lean Linux might be good enough and possibly more stable than a lean-Windows would be.
I may experiment with Tiny 7 and a few others though and see how they fare.
I would love to see MS help out the community and people in need. Any organization can do it actually; doesn’t have to be MS. It is far easier to put a minimal linux OS on a old, donated, PC than redesign a whole new OS (Windows) for that purpose. Linux will do the job more than sufficiently; so, why reinvent the wheel?
Very good point. Like I mentioned above, Lubuntu certainly did wonders for a Pentium 4. From what I hear, Puppy Linux can even make a Pentium 2 and 3 work fairly well. Even possibly a Pentium 1, though it probably won’t be that USEFUL for day-to-day usage.
I wouldnt be too surprised to see a lightweight version, after all, they are actually in the midst of putting out a lightweight version of Windows phone…
I wish 🙂 nice post