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    "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

    Recently started diving into these via VM's and curious about other peoples experiences. Tiny10/Tiny11, Ghost Specter, ReviOS, AtlasOS, ggOS, there seems to be new ones spawning almost daily. I've been playing around with them in VM's and they are interesting for use on older hardware. A buddy of mine who is a Mac user needed a windows machine to VPN to work, I had an old "Mini PC" with a Celeron processor and 4GB of RAM sitting in my box of spare parts, I put Win10 22H2 on it and it was awful. It took an eternity to boot, and the entire UI was so unresponsive as to be unusable. I installed ReviOS (Win 10 version) and it help significantly, it booted up in less than 1/2 the time, and while I wouldn't call it "snappy" it was certainly responsive enough to use as a functioning desktop.

    I know a lot of folks around here like messing with older hardware and was just curious if folks have experience/things they can share about these trimmed down OS's

    #2
    Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

    There's also LTSC if you want to pay for the license.
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      #3
      Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

      A shady edited Windows 10/11 OS of unknown origin so your buddy can VPN into his work......WTF !!

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        #4
        Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

        Originally posted by diif View Post
        A shady edited Windows 10/11 OS of unknown origin so your buddy can VPN into his work......WTF !!
        Yeah... I guess they could stand up an entire website documenting the project, open source the entire thing and make it available on GitHub, provide MD5 and SHA-256 hashes to verify the authenticity of the ISO, and have an open Discord server where anyone can go and talk to the authors ... on the hope someone falls for it and installs the OS so they can get your credit card info?

        Or you are just reflexively shitting on the idea because you are to immature to separate the topic from the author. Please, grow the F up.

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          #5
          Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

          No, a shady OS is shady and not to be anywhere near a corporate network regardless of their website, what they say and who posted it.
          I can't belive someone would jeapodize their employment and corporate network but then one of us is an IT professional and have been for a very long time.

          CC info is cheaper to buy than a pizza, ransomware of corporate networks is where the money is.
          Last edited by diif; 05-01-2023, 10:33 AM.

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            #6
            Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

            I haven't tried these, but thank you for suggesting them, S.B.!
            Even if they do turn out to be "shady" as diif suggested (which is also the 1st thing that came to my mind, if I have to be honest), I suppose they could be OK for a personal "I don't give a shit about" browser/gaming PC.

            The only Win10 installation I have is one PC I use exclusively for (the very rare) gaming with Epic, since their client is a piece of trash and updates regularly killed functionality (completely) for me on Windows 7 in the past. At some point, I just gave up trying to put up with their buggy crap and that's when I set up that one and only Win10 (Home) system. Being a Home version, though, I hate how slow it is, especially with updates. If I don't run it for a few weeks, I then have to remember to turn it on "early" (like 1 hour before I intend to use it) so it can do its updates/mumbo-jumbo Windows crap.

            So when I have more time, I might try one of these... well Windows 10, anyways. I see no reason to go up (down) to Win11.

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              #7
              Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

              I think I tried one of those Tiny installs back when they were rolling 7.

              It's exactly what it says on the tin - trimmed down Windows to the most spartan level.
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                #8
                Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

                Originally posted by momaka View Post
                I haven't tried these, but thank you for suggesting them, S.B.!
                Even if they do turn out to be "shady" as diif suggested (which is also the 1st thing that came to my mind, if I have to be honest), I suppose they could be OK for a personal "I don't give a shit about" browser/gaming PC.
                Like I said, it would be an insanely long con to put up websites, forums, subreddits, github repos, verification hashes, and discord servers all dedicated to the OS's just to try and make them appear legit to try and get some trojan out there. It's a dumb suggestion, diff is just a butthurt troll who wants to shit on anything I post vs contributing to the discussion

                Originally posted by momaka View Post
                The only Win10 installation I have is one PC I use exclusively for (the very rare) gaming with Epic, since their client is a piece of trash and updates regularly killed functionality (completely) for me on Windows 7 in the past. At some point, I just gave up trying to put up with their buggy crap and that's when I set up that one and only Win10 (Home) system. Being a Home version, though, I hate how slow it is, especially with updates. If I don't run it for a few weeks, I then have to remember to turn it on "early" (like 1 hour before I intend to use it) so it can do its updates/mumbo-jumbo Windows crap.
                Most of these are specifically made for gaming. Ghost Specter seems to be pretty popular among the gaming crowd. I've been running a few of these in VM's and haven't seen anything break yet. And man are they so much faster than stock Win10

                So when I have more time, I might try one of these... well Windows 10, anyways. I see no reason to go up (down) to Win11.

                I've been trying both, the Win11 ones seem to be slower on identical VM configs than the 10 versions, so if you are looking into using something to make old hardware usable. I'd go with a 10 one vs an 11 one

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                  #9
                  Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

                  Originally posted by SluggerB View Post
                  Like I said, it would be an insanely long con to put up websites, forums, subreddits, github repos, verification hashes, and discord servers all dedicated to the OS's just to try and make them appear legit to try and get some trojan out there. It's a dumb suggestion, diff is just a butthurt troll who wants to shit on anything I post vs contributing to the discussion
                  It's managed to convince you, with things that would take an afternoon to set up after the OS trimming/editing.
                  It's a very short con considering the lengths some have gone to (Solarwinds).
                  Play with whatever at home, I've nothing against this or other versions but they have no place connecting to a corporate/business network.
                  Perhaps the place your buddy works for isn't that big of a place if they haven't provided the hardware, the risks are still the same however even if the attitude isn't serious.

                  Voicing a different opinion to yourself especially when it comers from a professional perspective is not trolling. Get over yourself.

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                    #10
                    Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

                    LOL. Sorry diif I made the mistake of viewing your ignored post once, and am dumber for it. I won't make the mistake again. You can scream my name into the void if it makes you feel better, I'll never see it.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

                      I've never tried one of these....but I'm presuming they're just carved up Win10/11 Pro images....but naturally you'll still have to provide a key and they'll activate?

                      I'd probably be in the camp of 'fun to play with but would never use it in a professional setting' group.
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                        #12
                        Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

                        Originally posted by Topcat View Post
                        I've never tried one of these....but I'm presuming they're just carved up Win10/11 Pro images....but naturally you'll still have to provide a key and they'll activate?

                        I'd probably be in the camp of 'fun to play with but would never use it in a professional setting' group.
                        I was able to activate the ReviOS I installed. Although before I did that nothing didn't work so I don't know if activating is even required. I checked the network traffic on my router when the thing was powered on and it wasn't hitting any server over the internet, Microsoft or otherwise.

                        And yes I think these are best used to bring modern OS's to older hardware if people have software that requires it, and to improve gaming performance (which seems to be the big draw for most people running these). I know folks who like to try and breathe life into older hardware to try and make it useful hand out around here which is why I posted this. I would need a lot more evidence of stability before thinking about using one as a daily driver outside of a VM.

                        As a follow up for my friend, he took the PC home, was able to install his workplace VPN on it, and connected and worked from home just fine this past Friday. It's a remote desktop connection so all the processing power is on the machine he is connecting to, but the mini PC and ReviOS made a perfectly usable W10 "dumb terminal". Always happy to make old hardware useful again.
                        Last edited by SluggerB; 05-02-2023, 03:03 PM.

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                          #13
                          Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

                          Originally posted by SluggerB View Post
                          I was able to activate the ReviOS I installed. Although before I did that nothing didn't work so I don't know if activating is even required.

                          And yes I think these are best used to bring modern OS's to older hardware if people have software that requires it, and to improve gaming performance (which seems to be the big draw for most people running these). I know folks who like to try and breathe life into older hardware to try and make it useful hand out around here which is why I posted this.
                          Do you know if any of the CPU requirements were removed? For example; forcing this to run on some old Netburst era P4 or Xeon.... Yea, that would be a hoot, I must say!
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                            #14
                            Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

                            Curious about the CPU requirements too. I have two Netburst-era P4 HT 2.8 Northwood builds (Medion/MSI MS-6747+ Radeon 9700 Pro, aka the "TNT" box, and the other is a ABIT IS7-E + Radeon X1950 Pro combo, codenamed Skynet ) as well as a 64 x2 Manchester based monster that would love to run 10.
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                              #15
                              Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

                              Originally posted by SluggerB View Post
                              Like I said, it would be an insanely long con to put up websites, forums, subreddits, github repos, verification hashes, and discord servers all dedicated to the OS's just to try and make them appear legit to try and get some trojan out there.
                              Well, considering how much free software there is out there nowadays (and also free Linux distros), it indeed seems highly unlikely that this would be the case.
                              Again, it's something that came to my mind when I read the topic... but didn't seem unlogical at all that someone would do this.

                              Heck, on the browser-side of things, I've been using random 3rd party browsers like Mypal and New Moon to shop online with my XP systems for a few years now. As far as I can see, my CC's haven't been stolen yet, nor any of my banking accounts. (Perhaps I shouldn't taunt anyone, with this being the public section of the forum... but what I'm trying to say is, if someone wanted to, they would have stolen my CC's and whatnot already, even if I used known "reliable" browsers.)

                              Originally posted by SluggerB View Post
                              Most of these are specifically made for gaming. Ghost Specter seems to be pretty popular among the gaming crowd. I've been running a few of these in VM's and haven't seen anything break yet. And man are they so much faster than stock Win10
                              Sweet!
                              That's what I was hoping for, TBH.
                              I turned on my only Win10 PC yesterday, and it took it about 1.5 hours to finish updating, since it's been off for the past month. Ridiculous! Though, I will admit some blame for the slowness on myself, since it is installed on a regular HDD and not a SSD. It is a fast HDD, FWIW.

                              That said, we SHOULD have a choice of how much bloat we want. When installing the OS or even just running OOBE / 1st time setup, we should be asked which features we would or wouldn't like installed, so as to tailor the OS to everyone's needs. For example, I use Win10 for gaming only ATM, but I DON'T need the Xbox service running in the background... nor Phone service... nor a cubic butt-load of other office-related and "convenience" apps. Yet, not only are they installed, but they have some form of service/task running in the background too. It's silly!

                              Also, the concept of selecting what we want is not something new. Windows 98 had it, and to some extent so did XP. Vista/7 was the 1st to just shove it all in there without giving the user much of any options. But whatever, it's a moot point now to delve into the past over this.

                              Originally posted by SluggerB View Post
                              I've been trying both, the Win11 ones seem to be slower on identical VM configs than the 10 versions, so if you are looking into using something to make old hardware usable. I'd go with a 10 one vs an 11 one
                              Oh I was certainly expecting that.

                              Unless there is a real NEED to go to Win11, I won't be jumping on that bandwagon anytime soon.

                              Originally posted by Topcat View Post
                              Do you know if any of the CPU requirements were removed? For example; forcing this to run on some old Netburst era P4 or Xeon....
                              Oh for the love of quite little kittens, please no!
                              I mean, we all know how fast (not) P4's are, even with Windows 7. I don't even want to imagine this with Win10. Maybe make it extra painful and run it on a 1st gen SATA HDD

                              Originally posted by SluggerB View Post
                              I was able to activate the ReviOS I installed. Although before I did that nothing didn't work so I don't know if activating is even required.
                              Well, if it's a truly-legit version of the OS, then it should have / ask for activation key (provided one is not found in BIOS on the target machine.)

                              Or maybe it's just the "Home" version with all of the crap and activation watermarks removed?

                              Win10 Home doesn't require activation - you can use it as long as you like, but it will just have some features disabled, like being able to control themes and there will be a watermark in the lower-right of the screen, saying Windows is not activated (with very faint text.) How I know this? The Win10 install I did was a Home version. At the time, I didn't think I'd use it long term and even thought MS would disable the OS at some point if I never entered a key. But to my surprise, they didn't. I can still use this Win10 Home install 2 years later, and MS doesn't seem to care at all.

                              Originally posted by Topcat View Post
                              I'd probably be in the camp of 'fun to play with but would never use it in a professional setting' group.
                              Meh, depends on the place I work for.
                              If it's a shitty job, F- it, why not?

                              In the case of S.B.'s workmakte... if his workplace allows him to VPN with any PC, then why not?

                              Just because someone uses a legit MS OS doesn't mean they are more secure. I still see people dog-up their home PCs to hell with all kinds of bloatware and shady software. VPN-ing from such PC is just as bad as doing it with a "shady" Windows ISO. At least that's my (limited) experience.

                              Anyways, with all of this said, maybe I'll try one of these out (if time allows) sometime this or next week perhaps.
                              Last edited by momaka; 05-03-2023, 06:56 PM.

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                                #16
                                Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

                                Originally posted by SluggerB View Post
                                Recently started diving into these via VM's and curious about other peoples experiences. Tiny10/Tiny11, Ghost Specter, ReviOS, AtlasOS, ggOS, there seems to be new ones spawning almost daily. I've been playing around with them in VM's and they are interesting for use on older hardware. A buddy of mine who is a Mac user needed a windows machine to VPN to work, I had an old "Mini PC" with a Celeron processor and 4GB of RAM sitting in my box of spare parts, I put Win10 22H2 on it and it was awful. It took an eternity to boot, and the entire UI was so unresponsive as to be unusable. I installed ReviOS (Win 10 version) and it help significantly, it booted up in less than 1/2 the time, and while I wouldn't call it "snappy" it was certainly responsive enough to use as a functioning desktop.

                                I know a lot of folks around here like messing with older hardware and was just curious if folks have experience/things they can share about these trimmed down OS's
                                Used TinyXP back in the day. But just went stock Windows 7 and then 10 for the last few years due to work. Might want to get back to these types of OS when messing around with old hardware mostly 2nd and 3rd gen Intel processors.

                                Ghost Spectre Superlite is interesting too. Based on the video by some dude named NotroDan that I saw.

                                Thanks for this.
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                                  #17
                                  Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

                                  I've never used these "tiny" Windows versions (and I didn't know that they existed for 10 and 11), but it sounds interesting to screw around with. I don't have any junk computers that can run Windows 10 or 11 anymore, so if I ever try one of these, I'll put it in a VM with 4GB of RAM and see if the virtual memory use finishes off my SSD.

                                  My concern with these modified Windows versions is that they might be stripped down too much, so they're missing features and services that you need for the software you run. That's just because I've seen so much "speed up your computer" stuff that disables or removes things that I use regularly, but I think that's changing now. The scripts I've seen to remove stuff from an existing windows install have specific instructions to modify them based on your use case.

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                                    #18
                                    Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

                                    Originally posted by lti View Post
                                    My concern with these modified Windows versions is that they might be stripped down too much, so they're missing features and services that you need for the software you run. That's just because I've seen so much "speed up your computer" stuff that disables or removes things that I use regularly, but I think that's changing now. The scripts I've seen to remove stuff from an existing windows install have specific instructions to modify them based on your use case.
                                    Could be. I've just been playing a little bit with them and so far everything has worked, but there are reports out there of some software not working

                                    That said, we SHOULD have a choice of how much bloat we want
                                    With GhostSpecter, after its installed, you have a Terminal program you can lunch from the Desktop that you can run and you can selectively "add back" any feature you want. It's bare bones out of the box, but if you want Cortana or something you can run the program, pick it off a menu, and it will install just that feature for you

                                    Do you know if any of the CPU requirements were removed? For example; forcing this to run on some old Netburst era P4 or Xeon.... Yea, that would be a hoot, I must say!
                                    The graphical Installer for 11 seemed to still do the normal "Win 11" checks for compatibility (it complained my VM was not "compatible" and would not install), but a DISM install skipped past all that and installed and ran fine (both 10 and 11).

                                    I don't have much super old hardware laying around, but the PC I installed ReviOS on for my friend was a Celeron N3060 Processor.

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                                      #19
                                      Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

                                      these stripped down tiny oses are primarily useful to me as live boot cd oses that run off ram entirely without any other storage devices connected apart from the cd/dvd drive for the booting. i use them for dodgy stuff like dark web surfing and visiting. wont keep any history of what u did on the dark web because all the data in ram is lost when u reboot. secure stuff like i-banking and e-shopping erm... no thanks. i will try something else for that...

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                                        #20
                                        Re: "Tiny" Win10/Win11 OS versions

                                        i tried tiny11 on an acer aspire 7702z with duel cor 1.6 with 3gb 533.
                                        to my surprise it installed easily no problems.
                                        it would not install a web browser or let you install any other software until you provided it with a windows pro key.
                                        no thanks i installed linux arcolinux-openbox

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