Lone developer shrinks Window 7 down to 69 MB, claims 'virtually nothing can run' but that it does actually boot

Cape Town, South Africa - June 27, 2011: Stickers on a new laptop computer brag about its equipment: the Windows 7 operating system and the Intel Core i3 processor chip. Part of the keyboard can be seen, out of focus, in the background.

Remember when the prevailing wisdom of consumer tech was 'smaller is better'? And then it turned out there was such a thing as too small, as we kept losing our toasty-but-tiny-tech? Confronted with the bloat of today's Windows install, I do wish certain software peddlers had committed to a similar philosophy of 'less is more.' Pleasingly then, one tech tinkerer has pushed Windows 7 to its Lilliputian limits.

X user @XenoPanther shared a 69 MB version of Windows 7 x86 that just about boots (via The Register). Created more just to see if they could rather than as an actually usable OS, @XenoPanther writes, "Virtually nothing can run due to critical missing files such as common dialog boxes and common controls."