Inside Windows 7

[ZeroG]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/18/windows_7_heart/

Another of his themes was MinWin, a lightweight version of Windows whose purpose has sparked speculation. MinWin exists, he said, and contains the minimum necessary to boot and access the network: kernel, file system driver, device drivers, services and TCP/IP stack. It amounts to around 150 binaries, and requires 25MB disk space and 40MB RAM.

MinWin is handy for setup and system recovery, but its real purpose is to introduce what he calls "architectural layering" to Windows. Microsoft needs small footprint versions of Windows, both for embedded use and for the GUI-free Server Core edition. The problem is that the operating system is full of internal dependencies, and as Russinovich admitted: "We don't really understand those dependencies".

Glad to hear they know what they are doing...