Hi,
I recently got hold of a very old computer. I think it was purchased
around the year 2000. Currently no OS is loaded on it. Its
configuration is Pentium 3 - 450 MHz, 128 MB SD RAM, 4 GB Hard drive.
I have to give it to someone who wants to run very basic tasks like
some photo editing software, winamp and watching movies.
I have two questions -
Will windows XP be able to run smoothly for the tasks mentioned above?
Is it better to install some older OS like Windows 2000/Windows 98?
thanks.
I generally agree with the Pauls, XP will run - far better
if the eyecandy and unnecessary services are disabled so the
memory load and overhead is lower, but Win2k is more
suitable.
What OS licenses do you have available? I can't see paying
for a license for a newer OS like XP for a system worth no
more than the license, unless it's highly expected that
would be reused with another system when this is retired -
and of course getting a retail license instead of OEM which
costs even more. If the system has Win98, and the
multitasking is light, if the system doesn't need to stay
running for days at a time but rather will be turned off,
say once every few hours of aggressive use or every couple
days of light use as described, Win98 might be suitable if
only to save some $, there's only so much $ it is reasonable
to sink into aged hardware that has several limitations like
CPU, memory, hard drive space. WinXP w/SP2 is probably the
worst choice for that system, it will just struggle too much
and with the hard drive much fuller, the perpetual paging of
virtual memory that would happen will be all that much
slower.
At the very least you should upgrade memory to 256MB, or if
adding a 256MB module then with Win2k it will be comfortable
running basic applications. Photo editing - depends on the
size of the jobs. Winamp - plenty fast enough for that.
Watching movies - depends on the movie, a DVD will play fine
if your video card has hardware acceleration to some extent,
but if it doesn't then a P3/450 is marginal. Higher
compression video like MPEG4 at anything above 480x(n)
resolution may be too choppy to watch.
If you used Win2k (w/SP4), disabled unnecessary services,
and didn't leave a lot perpetually running in the
background, the booted-to-desktop memory usage can be around
60MB. That leaves enough memory remaining out of the
original 128MB to have a couple applications open for very
light multitasking, watching a DVD or whatever. That would
be the ideal unless you add more memory... and even then,
such a configured Win2k will make the most of the memory as
there are reasonable limits to how high the memory can be
upgraded on that era of system, and again it starts to cost
too much to buy half a gig of memory and an OS when newer
systems, used ones too, are not so much more expensive if at
all- that the total cost of this could be if upgraded too
much.
