Microsoft Busy Popping Windows Kernels

"A lot of people think of Windows as this large, bloated operating system, and that's maybe a fair characterization, I have to admit," Traut said. "But at its core, the kernel, and the components that make up the very core of the operating system, is actually pretty streamlined."

Traut showed a demonstration of MinWin, which lacks a graphical user interface. It takes up just 25M bytes when stored on disk, compared to the massive 4GB the full Windows Vista OS needs, Traut said.

MinWin can run on under 40MB of RAM, he said. "That's kind of proof there is actually a pretty nice little core inside of Windows," Traut said.

2010 is practically day after tomorrow. I can't be alone in thinking I'll be running XP until then, and wishing the MinWin kernel with a GUI strapped on was the whole darn thing. Your Operating System really should be a smaller file than your average Civilization game.