A little goes a long way

While building a home-brew PC recently, I ran into one of Microsoft's catch-22s. I had a legit new CD-ROM of Windows 98, but I couldn't load it onto my blank hard drive without first formatting the drive with a system floppy disk. And I couldn't make a floppy until I had installed the CD. I was stumped for a few hours, until I came across TinyApps.org, a software repository that specializes in small Windows and DOS programs and had just what I needed - links to system disks for all versions of Windows. After copying the appropriate disk image onto a floppy, I was set to go.

Miles Wolbe, a teacher and Web designer living in Hawaii, runs TinyApps and is, not surprisingly, an evangelist for more elegant software that doesn't take up a ton of space and is less likely to crash. Need a simple graphics editor? He presents one that's just 349K. How about a bare-bones word processor? Just 4K. For my newly formatted PC, small is beautiful once again.

TinyApps.org: www.tinyapps.org.


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