That laptop I've been tussling with has provided a couple of interesting (and wistful) glimpses into the past. A flash of the BIOS actually required an operating system based on DOS - so Windows 2000, which we had recently plunked down on the system for an employee's quick-and-dirty field work, wouldn't do. We don't have a copy of Windows 98 lying around the office, so I turned to an unused, legal copy of Windows 95. There I was, leaving the world of Windows 3.1 for Workgroups behind again - it was very 1996-1997. I successfully flashed the BIOS but, as I explained previously, failed to accomplish my ultimate objective.
Before pressing on - shutting down and removing the Windows 95 installation in the process - I glanced at the hard drive's free byte count. How much disk space did the old software consume? 70 megabytes. 70 megabytes might get you about fifteen MP3s - certainly not a modern Microsoft operating system. A dream, especially on the ancient 4-gigabyte drive. See "streamlined." While it wouldn't hold a candle to the applicability, flexibility and stability of Windows 2000 and (according to some) Windows XP, Windows 95 indeed lived in an age before the dawn of bloatware.