Everyone knows that Vista is bloated, its a big operating system because Microsoft have tried to cram every last possible function in to it. Thats not necessarily a bad thing, many people use many functions and Microsoft’s approach is to ensure that most users get what they need out of box.

The mobile device market however haven’t be happy since the beginning, its takes too much hardware to power and therefore is not good for mobile devices like UMPC’s. We have all spoken about it and all voiced our opinion on the subject.

So whats interesting to me is this post from Kevin Tofel of jkOnTheRun.

Its regarding an internal Microsoft project called ‘MinWin’ and comprises of the Windows 7 (the next version of Windows) kernel stripped to its minimum, we are talking absolute minimum. Its takes on 25MB of disk space and runs in less than 40MB of memory.

Now don’t think that this is the answer to all those problems that people have had trying to get Vista to run well on mobile devices because its not, for starters it only incorporates a basic web server and secondly Microsoft have no plans to develop it for release. They are however basing the next version of Windows on the concept, you take a smaller core, then add the items you want or need leaving you with a lighter operating system.

This video is of Microsoft’s Eric Traut giving a presentation at the University of Illinois about Microsoft’s virtualization technology, stick with is as the first few minutes are a little about Windows history but its quite interesting to see MinWin work:

The video is courtesy of Long Zheng of istartedsomething.com