how low can you go... with xp?

blueznl · Post by **blueznl** » Wed May 26, 2004 3:24 pm

what's the worst

system you got xp running on?

although rumours has it xp needs at least a p3 (for whatever reason) i've seen it run properly on p2's... celeron 333's... and i'm not entirely sure, but i've seen one machine supposedly a p1 (!) running xp... ok, you're free to add any ram you want and you may trim down xp, but besides that... how low can you go?

Karbon · Post by **Karbon** » Wed May 26, 2004 3:57 pm

P2 400 with 128 megs of RAM - 6.4 gig hard drive.

It does quite well really..

blueznl · Post by **blueznl** » Wed May 26, 2004 4:31 pm

the reason why i posted this is i have a few celeron 333's here, dell optiplex g1, 128 mb, changed the harddrive (from 4 gb to 10gb, but still noisy and slow drives and just dma2

), disables all 'windows for children' effects, added a virusscanner, applied all patches...

those machines run impressively fast! slowest component is clearly the harddrive

iirc the celeron 333 is a slighly brain damaged p2, isn't it?

on boot there's currently even still 35 meg free, amazing... i'll mess around a little with these three (preparing them for a test setup) and will keep some additional ram at hand, but never expected it to work so well

tinman · Post by **tinman** » Wed May 26, 2004 6:24 pm

I've had a full XP embedded image running on a National Semiconductor Geode 233 with some gawd awuful S3 based graphics chipset. OK, you don't get the full XPerience, but it's mostly there with the full image (around 500MB iirc).

I'm sure you can get lower though :)

blueznl · Post by **blueznl** » Wed May 26, 2004 11:34 pm

in a few weeks i'll try a p1 225 mmx 128 mb

it's supposed not to be able to run xp, we'll see...

Num3 · Post by **Num3** » Thu May 27, 2004 9:16 am

The lowest i went was a 486 DX 66 with 96Mb of memory...

By mistake i replaced the HD, with one that had winXp installed, and i turned it on....

When i got back home XP was running

PolyVector · Post by **PolyVector** » Thu May 27, 2004 9:55 am

El_Choni · Post by **El_Choni** » Thu May 27, 2004 10:49 am

When i got back home XP was running

After a 2 month vacation, I presume (that's what would take a 486 to boot XP) lol

blueznl · Post by **blueznl** » Thu May 27, 2004 1:27 pm

Num3, you must be kidding! Seriously?!?

Num3 · Post by **Num3** » Thu May 27, 2004 3:36 pm

Worked pretty well....

But the machine didn't cope with it....

I can't imagine how long it took to boot, but all drivers for the hardware i had where installed and running !

Intel 486 DX 66
VirgeS3 gfx board
3D Vodoo accelarator
SoundBlaster
Serial US Robotiks modem

Only thing that didn't work was the ISA scsi interface....

Karbon · Post by **Karbon** » Thu May 27, 2004 3:46 pm

Celerons used to be the same core with less cache.. I guess that still holds true.

Dreglor · Post by **Dreglor** » Fri May 28, 2004 1:54 am

lets try and do it on a linksys router!

i know there some sites that sell special versions of xp (legal?) that are stripped down to as low as 200 meg and running smooth on a old 200mhz :S

makes you wonder what exectly what windows does
i guess the key hear is to disable as many services as possible

blueznl · Post by **blueznl** » Fri May 28, 2004 8:42 am

i admit i do kill quite a few of the services

and am about to try xplite to see how far i can strip things down

what surprises me is that it actually runs, there were stories that xp and win2k were using p3 specific functionality, now a p2 and p3 are closely related, so i expected it to run on a p2 and celeron as well, but a p1 or even a 486dx surprises me...