This sounds strange given how much modern GPUs can do, but consider that a typical Windows machine ca. 2005 will have Access/JET Red, Active Directory/JET Blue, possibly MSSQL, definitely MSMQ/MTS, ODBC, OLE DB, DAO, ADO, that one SQL interpreter inside Windows Installer, and I’ve only just listed Microsoft’s database-adjacent things. I’m not surprised that press reports about the “MinWin” initiative mentioned as the main difficulty the fact that nobody could figure out if any given component was actually necessary for a Windows install to function, let alone to be compatible with third-party software. (Is anybody other than WordPad using the Word 6.0 parser included among the text converters?..) Now consider that this was, by our standards, a lightweight system on a massively underpowered computer.