Can still run it on a POD for socket 3 ;D

someone I know installed xp on a celeron 300mhz 64mb (i think) and it was horrible
over 5 minutes to get to the desktop and the hdd to stop thrashing

More memory and nlite will help in that department 😉

bump it to 128mb and the thrashing will stop

They wisely took my suggestion and went back to win98

I remember 128 MB being adequate in 2001. Yesterday I was asked to troubleshoot a system with 512 MB and Windows XP SP3 - it was out of memory before you even started any programs, so just constant thrashing.

Davros wrote:

someone I know installed xp on a celeron 300mhz 64mb (i think) and it was horrible
over 5 minutes to get to the desktop and the hdd to stop thrashing

Quite a while back I installed Windows XP Pro (w/SP1) on an AMD-500 (running at 550Mhz) with 256MB of RAM and a fairly quick (and large) hard drive. One word... ABOLUTELY FREAKIN' MISERABLE! OK, that was actually three words 🤣!

Reading those latest posts, I get kinda puzzled with my own setup.

WinXP sp1 (dual boot win98)
P4 1.6(northwood)
Abit with i845 chipset
mid2002 hard drive, nothing special
1024mb DDR1 PC2700 memory

I think this setup is quite snappy, from booting to the desktop settles take only 20sec.

- But the puzzling part, given above statements, is that I seem to have 837-847mb(170-180 used) FREE memory after boot(XP). And it usually stays that way for normal tasks. But went down to 726mb(300mb used) after starting Divine Divinity.

I have almost removed any pagefile, severly limited to only 20mb,
though task manager says 'PF usage' = 64mb - guess that includes some virtual part (?)

Now, it may help that the CPU has been severly overclocked (for the last 8 years!) from 1.6 to 2.66Ghz... ? 😕

Though forgive me if I sound ignorant here, knowing very little about the effects on the system by CPU speed vs amount of memory used by it - feel free to educate me if I've missed something.
Turning off the overclock did nothing(1.6ghz) to memory, only increased(!) free mem by a couple of mbytes... 😳
(not sure how say a Celeron would do, and with SD-ram instead of DDR)

- But still, I'd assume my system would work just fine(not games) with only a single 256mb module(?).

(no, I'm not going to test that, heh...)
.

My son's system runs xp sp3 fine with a p4 2.6, i845 m'board and 512mb ram. He managed to near kill it - constant thrashing, unresponsive - with bloatware but once we uninstalled mcafee and adaware in particular [he already had avg so didnt need mcafee anyhow] it was nice and snappy again.

Even on my Core2 Duo I disable all the XP eye candy in the performance screen, it's a nice boost along with removing the wallpaper.
It looks very plain though, but since I hardly ever boot into Windows it doesn't matter much. 😁

SP3 is a bad idea 😀

When XP first came out, I installed it on my Sony PictureBook C1X. Pentium MMX 266 MHz, 64 MB RAM, 6 GB hard drive.

It ran acceptably. (Although I have always used "Classic Mode" visual theme, even on fast computers.)

I wouldn't dare run XP SP3 on anything slower than a Pentium III now, though.

leileilol wrote:

SP3 is a bad idea 😀

I concur. I start to suspect that Overboard! fails to run on my netbook because it has SP3. The game actually runs on my desktop, which is SP2.

getting off-topic, but whats up with sp3?

ratfink wrote:

getting off-topic, but whats up with sp3?

I hope we're not hijacking this thread, but many people say that SP2 is actually more stable than SP3. I bought a new PC for my office, and I had to "downgrade" the Windows license because I wanted to install WinXP. The seller advise me that it is better to use SP2 instead of SP3 due to stability problems.

Anyway, as said in my post above, Overboard! refuses to run on my netbook --which uses SP3. But it runs on the new PC, which uses SP2. Still, no sound... The CD music runs fine, but no sound effects at all.

SP2 vs. SP1 is the bigger question. Those are almost different OSs. SP3 is just a big hotfix rollup for SP2, but SP2 was a major overhaul of many things.

By the way, I've always been "fascinated" by people who have run XP on rigs with 64-128MB RAM.... They always seem to claim that it's "not that bad" too. Yeah right. 😁

My current rig is a P4 2.666GHz with 512MB RAM, running Windows XP Pro w/SP3. So far, no problems here, and it's quite zippy 😀 Also, anytime that I'm working on a customer's PC that's running XP, I always install SP2 and then SP3.

BTW, that could be a possible problem to why some folks have a problem with SP3 (if they are upgrading from SP1). It's always recommended to update to SP2 *before* updating to SP3.

Anyhow, as far as speed... on the other hand, I went from a 233MMX to the afore mentioned AMD550, and then to this P4 last year... so's ANYTHING for me would be a major improvement over the first two 🤣!

So, those of you that complained about thrashing and misery, I take all this to mean it was the SP3 that was causing the problems ??

And that say 256mb memory and SP1 should be ok, nomatter what speed/model CPU ?

I've had XP SP2 running on 192mb PC100 without memory thrash hell with PII 233MHz.