What OS do you think people ran on AthlonXP systems when they were new? The 'XP' in the AthlonXP name wasn't entirely coincidental... Pretty much anything PIII-class or better will run XP just fine (.Net stuff included), so long as you have enough RAM. Consider 512MB to be the bare minimum, try to get 1GB or more.

As for the Canon software, I'm not familiar with that program specifically, but speaking generally, it's been my experience that a lot of those OEM photo programs are bloated and slow on just about any sort of hardware.

Well, I'd consider 192MB the bare minimum. 512MB was XP power user territory once upon a time.

512mb should be enough for most stuff.
Just don't install Service Pack 3, it's going to run very slowly on that machine.
SP2 should be great 😀

swaaye wrote:

Well, I'd consider 192MB the bare minimum. 512MB was XP power user territory once upon a time.

The sweet spot is 2 GB with XP and do not go then that
F2bnp your wrong you need the latest service pack any way becuases min apps and some games make it a min requirements or they will not install or will not work after install.

ncmark wrote:

I have an Athlon XP 2400+ that I was thinking about upgrading to Windows XP. Question - does this processor really have the horsepower for Windows XP?

Yes! There are basically 2 ways to use XP:
1)For nothing but (offline) gaming
2)For whatever, but it goes online

If 1, then your rig will most definitely be enough!
If 2, then your CPU is plenty for internet browsing, it will come down to how much RAM you have. Speaking of which...

ncmark wrote:

The board is an Asus AV7333, which I believe supports a maximum of 3 gigabytes of ram. One of the things I wanted it for was to run the Canon digital photo studio, which requires the microsoft NET framework. I installed this at work and it was immediately bug-time slow-downs, which is why I am questioning whether this computer could handle it. Any advice or comments would be appreciated.

...I'd recommend against using more then 4 banks of memory.
Usually SS memory bars are 1 bank and DS ones are 2 banks. When your board has more then 4 banks of memory, it'll underclock the RAM to just 266Mhz. If your XP-2400 uses 266Mhz FSB (which it most likely does) then you could go more then 4 banks. But it's just a heads up.

I don't know why you got the slowdowns when you did, sorry about it.

F2bnp wrote:

512mb should be enough for most stuff.
Just don't install Service Pack 3, it's going to run very slowly on that machine.
SP2 should be great 😀

=great for XP offline (only XP games etc)

shspvr wrote:

swaaye wrote:

Well, I'd consider 192MB the bare minimum. 512MB was XP power user territory once upon a time.

The sweet spot is 2 GB with XP and do not go then that
F2bnp your wrong you need the latest service pack any way becuases min apps and some games make it a min requirements or they will not install or will not work after install.

=great for internet etc. Simply this: If internet == 1, then SP3+2GB == 1 also. If no internet then SP2+512MB might be enough (but I'd still recommend slipstreaming SP3), as will 512MB be for an offline rig.

So basically you were both right! Cheers mates! 😁

Well, I'd consider 192MB the bare minimum. 512MB was XP power user territory once upon a time.

I meant the bare minimum to be reasonably usable with XP in its current incarnation, and I stand by what I said. You could scrape by with 192MB on XP SP0/SP1, but it was never particularly pleasant, and that was also a long time ago. SP2 made the system quite a bit heavier, and most third-party software has also become quite a bit heavier since then.

Also, avoiding SP3 is pointless. I couldn't disagree more with F2bnp... I've never seen any performance difference whatsoever, on any machine, and I've dealt with a lot of different machines running it. And even if it was a little slower than SP2, it'd still be worthwhile just for the all the security fixes.

I forgot to add: I can highly recommend using nlite to make a leaner XP install ISO. Test it in VPC or send me a PM 😉

A 2400+ should easily handle XP if you work around the bottlenecks of the system.

As an experiment I set up an XP2600+ with 2Gigs of RAM and Win2k, which is known for its ridiculous boot times.
Since there's no way I'll ever come even close to using 2GB RAM in this system, I decided to create a 1GB RAMDisk for temp/cache/swap files.

The OS is installed on a cheap 4GB CF card (Transcend MLC 133x) and connected via CF>IDE adapter to the mainboard. Since it's a super cheap card, the transfer rates are terrible...not even 25MB/s.

But the system runs like it's on steroids. Loading times, workspeed etc. it's almost insane for this old rig.
Firefox5 starts in about 2.5 seconds, while my main computer (x2 5000+ with a WD Raptor system disc) takes three times as long.

The CF card + adapter from China was about 20$ total, absolutely worth it, as it boosts even outdated systems by a lot!
The low access times work wonders. I have no doubt that XP will run just as well. 1GB RAM should still be enouth, even for web applications.

One more note about the RAM:
I've got 2x1GB sticks installed and the system is quite picky. It wouldn't post with quality Corsair RAM (which works perfectly on a different board), but luckily I had some old Kingston Value DIMMs lying around, which did the trick.

Mystery wrote:

The CF card + adapter from China was about 20$ total, absolutely worth it, as it boosts even outdated systems by a lot!

This seems to be becoming THE way to go with retro rigs, making standard harddrives nearly worthless in the coming time provided CF cards remain IDE compatibility.
Very interesting indeed!!

Mystery wrote:

But the system runs like it's on steroids. Loading times, workspeed etc. it's almost insane for this old rig.
Firefox5 starts in about 2.5 seconds, while my main computer (x2 5000+ with a WD Raptor system disc) takes three times as long.

The CF's read transfer rate might be somewhat slow, but the access times aren't. That's what you're seeing. This is also what makes SSDs such a huge improvement over HDDs. But CF cards are often problematic as OS drives because of their slow small file write performance that causes pauses and stutters. Like my EeePC 900's slow SSDs. There are tweaks to improve this though.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

I meant the bare minimum to be reasonably usable with XP in its current incarnation, and I stand by wat I said.

It depends on what you're doing of course. I had a Pentium II notebook on XP SP2 with 192MB for a long time at work because somebody needed a webmail / web machine and XP was actually smoother than 98SE and 2k. It worked surprisingly well for only IE.

I would absolutely prefer to have 1GB+ RAM on XP but even SP2/3 are ok on ~256MB for some things.

Time for some flame wars yipeeee 😁.
Seriously though, why would he ever want to run the latest applications and games on an Athlon XP 2400+? It's already too slow to run them, so SP3 being a requirement isn't really a good excuse to install it.
The reason I said I would not install SP3 on such an old machine is because I've experienced the difference in speed first hand. And boy, it's quite big. I have an old Pentium 4 at 3GHz with 1 GB RAM and almost no internet access (unless you consider 56k serious Internets 😜) and sometimes I really wonder why it runs like shit...
It used to run just dandy with SP2, not to mention plain vanilla XP but then you lost other things.

It's not the amount of RAM it consumes, it's just that it needs a greater processor. If one has a Dual Core processor then by all means they should install SP3 as it is useful.
Therefore, I still believe 512mb should be enough for most stuff on SP2 (just don't go opening multiple tabs on Firefox with youtube videos on each one of the tabs). 1GB is awesome 😉
You don't need SP3.

If I see angry words and poop flinging over XP, I might start deleting. 😁 There's a strict new "make retro love, not retro war" policy I have.

There is nothing magical about a service pack. It's just a collection of all the updates that haven been released since the last service pack + some previously unreleased fixes and mabye a new feature or two.

If you are that serious about sticking with SP2 then you should turn off auto updates and stay at SP2 level (no post SP2 updates at all).

Your computer is slow because it's a P4.

DosFreak wrote:

There is nothing magical about a service pack. It's just a collection of all the updates that haven been released since the last service pack + some previously unreleased fixes and mabye a new feature or two.

If you are that serious about sticking with SP2 then you should turn off auto updates and stay at SP2 level (no post SP2 updates at all).

Your computer is slow because it's a P4.

Just to get things straight, the Pentium 4 is not my primary machine, not even secondary. It has really basic stuff and the minimum amount of applications on startup.

The Pentium 4 was brand new when Windows XP was released and this one is one of the last on socket 478 and I think P4 only lasted another year after this on socket 775. Windows XP shouldn't be slow at all on a Pentium 4 3GHz. And it wasn't until SP3. I used to be skeptical when people said SP3 was a performance hog until I experienced it first hand.

if you must use XP on a slow POS machine, use winflp... it'll work fine even for playing games, and it boots at NT4-like speeds instead of being snail's pace
no need to discuss where to get it, the answer is obvious 😉

as for P4... the CPU sucked enough that athlon XPs ran circles around them... I had a dell that had a northwood P4 in it... came with XP, slow as balls... I installed 32-bit 7 on it, and it was a noticeable speed increase... everything ran smoother and the system was more usable... yes, it was still slow, but it became tolerable.... 7 is better optimized for netbooks, meaning slow CPUs but faster HDDs and more memory... if your system is configured like that, then 7 will work better

since this thread is about productivity apps and not games, we don't need to care about games but system usability instead 😀

and the reason why XP SP3 is "slow" is because people just install the crap without defragging the system or deleting the uninstall files
if you installed it slipstreamed, it runs just as fast as SP2... I wouldn't bother with SP2 at all because it's no longer supported and you will receive NO SP2 compatible updates... it is also vulnerable to many exploits
the only reason to use SP2 at all is if your machine is not even networked

F2bnp wrote:

The reason I said I would not install SP3 on such an old machine is because I've experienced the difference in speed first hand. And boy, it's quite big. I have an old Pentium 4 at 3GHz with 1 GB RAM and almost no internet access (unless you consider 56k serious Internets Sticking Tongue Out) and sometimes I really wonder why it runs like shit...
It used to run just dandy with SP2, not to mention plain vanilla XP but then you lost other things.

So... you encountered a slowdown on one P4 machine. I haven't encountered any slowdowns on any of dozens of machines going all the way back to decrepit old PIIs. And if SP3 caused noticeable slowdowns on a P4, it would damn sure have been glacial on a 266mhz PII. Yet it wasn't.

Maybe it had some problems with the specific hardware you were using. That certainly wouldn't be unheard of with Windows. Maybe your problem was something else entirely. Either way, problems with one machine is no reason to go out spreading FUD about something that works perfectly fine for the majority of people.

^^^
QFT

Whatever. It wasn't one machine, I had similar results on Pentium 3 machines, I just gave an example of a relatively "fast" machine.
My opinion on SP3 remains the same, it was quite a bit slower than SP2.
In the end, anybody can install whatever they like, I was voicing an opinion, only to have people jump at me. Jeez.