Cramming the entire Windows OS into an extremely small file is a favourite pastime of NTDev, and we love to see a master at work. This time, they've crammed Windows 11 into just 2.29 GB of storage space by only including "all the essentials, none of the fluff."
The project is called nano11. It squishes the Windows 11 ISO file—7.04 GB for Windows 11 Insider build 26200—down to just 2.29 GB. In doing so, it removes much of what NTDev considers bloat, including but not limited to:
- Xbox
- Weather
- Office
- Solitaire
- Windows Update (yes, really)
- Windows Defender
- Most drivers
- Bitlocker
- Search
- Biometrics
- Accessibility features
- Audio
- Microsoft Edge
- Internet Explorer (that was still in there?)
What's more, none of this can be added back in at a later time. It's gone. For good. Get over it.
You might want to think about what you like about Windows 11 before you try to shrink your ISO with nano11, though there are some practical uses, namely lightweight VMs with very limited functionality required and legacy system builds.
"This is an extreme experimental script designed for creating a quick and dirty development testbed. It removes everything possible to get the smallest footprint, including the Windows Component Store (WinSxS), core services, and much more," the Github project says.
The project is open source and freely available to tinker with, however. Theoretically, someone could tailor it to their needs. Importantly, it does still bypass Microsoft Account requirements during first boot—phew.
For reference, the SteamOS ISO file is 2.9 GB. So Windows is pretty large by comparison. Though for all the stuff crammed in there by Microsoft, 7.04 GB as standard isn't half-bad. And it's not like Linux is naturally slimmer: I just downloaded the latest Bazzite ISO, a popular Linux gaming OS, and it's 7 GB total.
NTDev's previous projects include a project to to get Windows 11 running on a mere 184 MB of RAM, which makes a mockery of Microsoft's requirement of at least 4 GB, and shrinking the entire OS down to 100 MB. Though you really, really, don't want to run that one. It's basically a text-only version of Windows—no GUI.
This isn't the first time that NTDev has shrunk Windows 11 down to these sorts of sizes, either. tiny11 previously allowed for a miniscule ISO file for the modern OS, with the option for tiny11 core to take things even further, features like Windows Defender, as is the case now with nano11. The tiny11 builder is the better way to tinker with the OS if you're serious about trimming it down into something remotely usable.
As tiny11 core, nano 11, and various other shrinking experiments show, there's a certain point where Windows 11 becomes largely unrecognisable or practically unusable for cutting so much out of the ISO. But hey, it's a fun experiment anyways.
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