Putting WinXP on a old PC

  • Thread starter Thread starter Brian Bygland
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Brian Bygland

I am considering putting XP Pro on an old Pentium 200 PC with 384 MB RAM and a
big hard drive. Should this work or am I crazy?

Brian
 
In
I am considering putting XP Pro on an old Pentium 200 PC with 384 MB
RAM and a big hard drive. Should this work or am I crazy?
Click to expand...


The official minimum CPU speed is 233MHX. Whether it will work at
all, I'm not sure, but if so it will certainly perform very
poorly. Usually you need to go well above official minimums for
adequate perfromance.
 
For test purposes I set up XP Pro some time ago as a clean install on a
reformatted drive on an old IBM PC 133MHZ and 64MB RAM and it worked almost
ok. It was very slow and took forever to boot up but the minmum system
requirement did not prevent it from installing. I would be interested to see
how it performs with a better RAM and a slightly higher processor. If you
dare do it then let us know how it goes.

Eric
 
Eric said:
For test purposes I set up XP Pro some time ago as a clean install on a
reformatted drive on an old IBM PC 133MHZ and 64MB RAM and it worked almost
ok. It was very slow and took forever to boot up but the minmum system
requirement did not prevent it from installing. I would be interested to see
how it performs with a better RAM and a slightly higher processor. If you
dare do it then let us know how it goes.

Eric
Click to expand...

Thanks everyone. I pretty much thought that it was crazy. When I get my next PC
in a few month and this one become surplus, I might give it a try just to see
what happens.

Brian
 
The RAM is acceptable, but the CPU is not enough for XP

"System Requirements for Windows XP Operating Systems"
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314865&Product=winxp

My suggested minimum requirements:
a.. Pentium 2 600-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster
b.. At least 128 megabytes (MB) of RAM (256 MB is recommended)
c.. At least 5 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk
d.. CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
e.. Keyboard and a Microsoft Mouse or some other compatible pointing
device
f.. Video adapter and monitor with Super VGA (800 x 600)or higher
resolution
g.. Sound card
h.. Speakers or headphones
My suggested specs:
a.. Pentium 3 - 1 GHz processor or faster
b.. At least 256 megabytes (MB) of RAM (512 MB is the best)
c.. At least 20 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk
d.. CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
e.. Keyboard and a Microsoft Mouse or some other compatible pointing
device
f.. Video adapter and monitor with Super VGA (1024x768) or higher
resolution
g.. Sound card
h.. Speakers or headphones
i.. 2 USB ports
j.. Ethernet
 
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