By Andy Patrizio,
Despite Microsoft's insistence that Internet Explorer and Windows 98 cannot be separated, a Maryland biologist has done it and is willing to share his methods with anyone who's interested.
Shane Brooks, a researcher at the University of Maryland, began his IE extraction project, called 98Lite, because Win 98 ran so poorly on his Pentium 133-MHz computer.
"It seemed like overkill, that every time I wanted to browse files, I was calling up this huge monolithic program," Brooks said. "It really just boils down to reclaiming performance that is lost when software is developed for the top end of the available hardware without adequate consideration for performance at the lower end."
Brooks first tried to install the Win 95 IE on Win 98. After some experimentation, he determined only three files had to be removed -- ComDlg32.dll, Shell32.dll, and Explorer.exe. Brooks wrote a small program to extract the older Win 95 equivalents from the Win 95 CD and install them in the proper directory.
When that was successful, Brooks removed directories associated with IE 4.0. The end result was a 32-megabyte reduction in the size of Windows and a near doubling of the Explorer performance on his low-end computer.
| "Normal" Install |
| Windows Dir:
130,608,199 bytes 1,815 files, 66 folders Registry: System.dat1,495,072 bytes User.dat114,720 bytes Internet Explorer Dir: 935,568 bytes 28 files, 2 folders |
| 98Lite Install | Windows Dir:
99,063,806 bytes 1,475 files, 31 folders Registry: System.dat876,576 bytes User.dat49,184 bytes Internet Explorer Dir: none! |
Total Saving 32,479,961 bytes 368 files 37 folders |
The heart of IE, the universal document viewer, is still on the system. That's the
HTML rendering engine used to view help files and HTML messages in Outlook Express.
VBScript
also remains, since it's used in the help files.
Among the things that don't work anymore: the Internet Connection Wizard, Windows Update, and advanced shell features of IE, such as Active Desktop and Quick Toolbar. Brooks said many people who ran his 98Lite modification program were able to install IE 4.0 and even IE 5.0 on their systems and that it runs perfectly.
Microsoft said it wants more time to evaluate what Brooks has done, but said it doesn't think the 98Lite modification is good for end users. "We allow end users to change Windows 98 in any way they wish, but the initial impression is this process seems to retard and replace many of the core functions that users benefit from in Windows 98," said Jim Cullinan, a spokesman for the company.
Brooks isn't selling his product, but it does take some of the wind out of Microsoft's integration claims, said one analyst. "They were pretty steadfast that [IE] was so integrally woven into the OS that you couldn't remove the files without breaking the OS," said Dwight Davis of Boston-based Summit Strategies. "If [Brooks] has done this, then it's put the lie to Microsoft's position that you can't extract IE from Windows."
But Davis said he doubts many people will want to mess with their Windows system, particularly because they forfeit all technical support from Microsoft if they do.
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