Till yesterday, I had no idea this software existed. And neither did our Volume License administrator. And not even the Microsoft partners. I was planning to blog about the E-learning courses from Microsoft when I checked for some info on Wikipedia and came across this software which all volume licensing customers have access to.

Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PC’s (that’s a mouth full) is a lite version of Windows XP designed to run on low configuration machines. It has very few features and even fewer dependencies and hence starts up and runs pretty fast.

I decided to give it a try. I created a new VMware machine with 128MB ram, a 4GB hdd and started the install. It went through very smoothly.

A typical install which consists of just the Desktop, Remote Desktop and IE needs about 651MB of disk space.

A full install is about 1.1GB.

On completion of install the Virtual Machine rebooted 3 times before it was ready for first use. I guess reboots are just normal with MS Windows. :) I’ve been using the default IE 6 for a while now and it seems fairly stable. The networking features too are the same as on a regular XP machine. Some of the command line favorites like ipconfig are missing though!

I think this is a great platform for testing applications especially since the minimum ram required is about 64MB. Too bad MS doesn’t share this software with non-volume license users. I think they should just give this for free to everyone!