Small-Tiny-Micro Windows XP
ISOs by eXPerience & Others
There are around 100 small-ish Windows XP ISOs available here for download.
About half of these are by eXPerience and the rest by various authors including Dark Reverser, Pankoza, Chibi, K4101-EVO23 and several other authors - for some ISOs the author is now lost in time.
I've tried quite a few of these in VirtualBox, especially those by eXPerience, and for quite a few years MicroXP v0.82 was my go-to XP install for old laptops.
A lot of the ones I've tried have a very brief notation included in the file name to distinguish them as having half a dozen downloaded ISOs named "Windows XP Lite" doesn't tell me much.
I know that some people get twitchy about renaming downloaded files, but . . . my house, my rules (SIUP).
I'm not going to give a detailed description of each of the ISOs here as there are too many of them - if one catches your eye, then download it and try it in VirtualBox or VMware as most ISOs are quite small (they range in size from 63mb to 700mb, although there are a couple of smaller PE versions included for SnGs).
I've grouped the ISOs according to author - if I have 2+ ISOs from an author then they're grouped separately.
I've also listed the ISOs in what's essentially a directory dump of how the ISOs are stored on this server.
To download any of the ISOs below, just click on the ISO name.
These are not all of the Windows XP versions I have, just some of the smaller and more interesting ones.
Some of them are quite impressive for what's been achieved in such a small package.
All credit to the authors for making these available for everyone to enjoy.
Almost all will scan cleanly but a few may attract attention from your AV for key finders or system tweaks etc. but then you know the drill - adult behaviour required.
Anyways, hê pret !
Kind regards,
Shotter_nail
Downloads - listed by author - click a file name to download:
To download a .PDF document with a listing of the ISOs available on this page . . . click here.
ISO Sources:
The best site I've found for small / customised versions of Windows XP (and others) is the Internet Archive.
There are probably thousands of Windows XP versions on the site.
For example, searching for "XP Lite" returns 667 matches: https://archive.org/search?query=%28XP%20lite%29
Searches for related keywords such as "XP Nano", "XP Super", "XP Tiny", etc. will probably be similar.
There are still plenty of people modifying Windows XP (and w7 and w10) and downloading from the Archive is probably less risky than downloading from some other sites, as the Archive allows reviews of it's files.
The archive can also be a reasonably good source of drivers, although about the best sites I've found for early to mid 2000s drivers are driverscape.com and driverguide.com, but there are heaps of others - just avoid the sites that insist you login to download files as many of these seem a bit dodgy.
For software for older OSs, WinWorldPC and RetroSystemsRevival are great resources, but there are dozens of other good sites to be found - as long as you exercise some common sense and avoid sites that use "crack" or "keygen" in the site description that pops up in your search results.
And searching for Windows XP or Windows 98 on YouTube will throw up thousands of hits for tutorials and how-to's for these, so there's no shortage of advice about how to keep using these OSs in 2024, either as daily drivers or simply for a hobby.
Windows XP and Windows 98 are also great reminders of what an OS should be - small, functional, efficient and not focussed on restricting the user experience (or selling them games or other useless software).
Windows XP may not be mainstream anymore, but reports that it's dead and buried are a little overblown.
VirtualBox - Portable Versions:
I usually use portable apps, so I've uploaded a small selection of VirtualBox Portable installations (in .zip files) that could be useful for testing the ISOs above.
No install needed, just extract the folder from the .zip and run VirtualBoxPortable.exe.
Included are versions that run on XP+, Windows 7+ and Windows 8.1+ (x32 + x64).
As a bonus I've included one of the last versions of the original VirtualBox by Innotek that will run on Windows 2000-XP (although it's an installer version rather than a portable version) for all you w2000 diehards.
If you choose to try one (or more) of the portable versions read the note about possible driver issues.
Either use the link on the home page to go to the download page or just click here.
Screenshots: (Use your browser's right click function "Open Image In New Tab" to see larger images)
It's the end of the week and all motivation is gone . . . but here are a few screenshots:
eXPerience MicroXP 0.82
eXPerience Tiny2003
eXPerience TinyB XP vI
Dark Reverser MicroXP 0.97
Dark Reverser MicroXP 1.06
Pankoza XP Nano Lite
XP Performance Edition
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