afellowspeedrunner / smolxp

A lightweight version of Windows XP for older PC's or testing. Inspired from Tiny10 and Tiny11.

SmolXP

Work on this has been paused indefinitely, and I don't think I'll return to it at all.

I don't want to work on this anymore, I seriously don't. This project was just the result of me messing around with nLite for the first time. This project got an amount of attention it should of never deserved. Someone could of easily replicated what this project does within 5 minutes, and I also don't want to be the known as the person who slimmed Windows XP down as far as I could while making it still functional. I cannot believe that out of all of my projects, this one was the most popular. I really hate that fact. Every other project I've made has gotten no attention, but this one got all of it.

If you want to see stuff that I actually put proper time and work into, then please look at my other projects. This project is just really small modifications in nLite that anyone could do easily, so please stop liking this. It's nothing special or even anything impressive. If you really want to continue this project yourself, fork it. I'm not going to work on this anytime in the future from what I can see.

Description

SmolXP is a compact version of Windows XP designed for use on low-performance computers or as a disposable operating system for testing purposes. Its small ISO and installation size make it suitable for use on older computers with limited resources.

This project was inspired by the custom Windows version Tiny10 and Tiny11 by NTDEV.

Incredibly, SmolXP is able to run with just 24MB of RAM and 32MB of VRAM.

With VMware Tools installed with no pagefile and compression enabled, it can take up only 100-400MB of space on a 5GB storage medium.

Installation doesn't take long. I didn't time that but if I had to say depending on what specs your using it could take 3-10 minutes. Much faster than normal XP.

SmolXP 2.0's x86 and x64 version side by side.

So what happened to the previous name "TinyXP"?

Turns out it was already used in 2008 by someone else. I will not change the older versions to include the new name. That would take too much time. This project now goes by "SmolXP" as suggested again by @yum13241.

Virtual Machine Software that can install and run SmolXP

VMware Workstation 17 VirtualBox (Guest Editions doesn't work right in x64.)

Known Fixable Issues

Nothing so far.

Known Unfixable Issues

VBox Guest Editions don't work correctly with x64.

This is seems to be more an issue with Windows XP x64 itself, and less to do with SmolXP x64. If it works fine in SmolXP x86 then why doesn't it work in x64? It can't of been something that nLite did, the settings would of been the exact same. Therefore, I think it's just an issue with the code for XP x64. This is unfixable for the time being and probably will never be fixed. Go use VMware or QEMU for full support in x64, use VirtualBox if you want but be aware you will not have proper support.

Fixed Issues

WPADISABLE.bat

A patch has been rolled out in Release 1.3.

Automatic Drive Wiping during TextMode Setup

A patch has been rolled out in Release 1.2.

Product Key error during Graphical Setup

A patch has been rolled out in Release 1.2.

Random signon bug

A patch has been rolled out in Release 1.2.

Activation

A patch has been rolled out in Release 1.1.

All bugs above were fixed by @yum13241. Huge thanks! All credits for these patches go to @yum13241.

smolxp's Issues

How to fix the CD problem:

The problem:

I forgot how to disable this so I'll release a 1.2 if I figure it out. IF YOU BOOT INTO THE CD. IT. WILL. WIPE. YOUR DRIVE. It's somehow set it do that due to unattended setup. I need to fix this so please if you install this new version that you better hope that if you accidentally boot into it you didn't have anything important on the drive!!!

Use any mode that is not "Fully unattended" in nLite.

Problems with booting on physical machine

I am struggling to boot the installer on a physical laptop (no floppy, no cd drive, only USB storage available for external boot).

Not sure if I am missing something simple,
Burned ISO to USB stick, not bootable and contents of it are not visible from DOS (I cant see a setup.exe file on the iso anyway so I doubt I could start the install from DOS anyway)
Burned that little image found in [boot] folder to USB stick, again not bootable from USB on my laptop.

Any pointers on how to boot it on EEE PC 901 or similar would be appreciated.

Generic ACPI Battery not autoinstalled, Battery monitoring not functioning, Battery listed as Unknown Plug And Play

Hi, i really do like this, especially compared to TinyXP which was comparatively much more of a headache to get running. However, there is one problem, and that's that i haven't been able to get the battery monitoring to work, and battery life was a big reason for going with this specific build. I'm using an MSI Wind u100. Default XP as well as TinyXP detects it as an ACPI compliant battery and are able to monitor it, but SmolXP does not, it shows up as a generic unknown plug and play device, and any ACPI driver option i select does not work. I've already scoured about every inch of google to see if i could slipstream the windows preinstalled ACPI driver, but no luck. Any ideas?