Try Windows 2000.

Any reason you're running Windows Updates, Security Essentials, and modern browsers and such? ("There's your problem.") I have an XP-SP2 box that "idles" on around 130MB of memory, with all drivers loaded (it has some newer updates too, but I didn't feel like installing SP3). That would be perfectly functional on 512MB of RAM. Win2k SP4, in my experience, isn't much better once you've loaded drivers (most of them are going to be the same as the XP driver anyways).

I've had a 1266MHz P3-S + Ti 4200 + 512MB + TUSL2-C as my main system for 2 years with windows 2000.
Worked very well, and enough juice to jump directly to athlon 60 3400+ + X800XT + 1GB.

you could dual boot Win98SE and Windows 2000, 2000 will do anything this machine could want while being lighter on its feet (even with service pack 4) (XP has better driver support for much later hardware, but I doubt thats an issue), and 98SE will be there for compatibility with older Win9X centric software.

And you can even get fairly recent security updates for it.

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/146529-pe-too … eating-patches/

QBiN wrote:

But I think I've let it do one too many Windows Updates. It seems like "recent" Windows updates have rendered the machine pretty slow.

You got it.

QBiN wrote:

My question is, should I just re-install XP and keep the software roughly '01/'02 era?

That would be my choice.

obobskivich wrote:

Any reason you're running Windows Updates, Security Essentials, and modern browsers and such? ("There's your problem.")

Wot 'e said. I don't know why one would add other than SP2 for a P3 gamebox.

Generally I view XP SP2 as a more stable W98SE that can also use more RAM and faster hardware. For me, this leaves W98SE to be a dedicated DX7 box for the few games XP won't play.

However the hardware you list goes well with W98SE. Setting the stability issue aside, I'm not sure it wouldn't be a smidge faster. I'd suggest it'd be interesting to install both as a dual-boot to find out.

Its not to late to save your XP install.

Run "msconfig" and disable all processes you think you can live without.
Through trial and error (or boring research) you can strip alot of fat.

The XP system I am playing around with now has about 90MB "Commit Charge" and below 30MB Total Kernel memory. Its a Core 2 Quad system with 2GB memory and a Geforce 8800 GTX fully functional with all drivers, Plug and play, and all networking services. I think this installation would run smoothly on a P2 450 with 512 MB memory 😀

Depend on what type of games you want to play on your machine.
If you want to stick with Windows XP, then you can disable Security Center (under Services) as this takes up a lot of resources.
Also disable system restore.
There are a couple of other tweaks that you can do to improve system performance but, I won't get into too much detail now.

However, considering the CPU that you have (that was released some time in 2002?), you could just as well install Windows 98SE with the unofficial service pack 2.1a.
Most games that could run on your CPU still supported Windows 98SE and actually ran much better on this operating system (due to less resources) and the fact they were designed to run on Windows 98SE.

QBiN wrote:

So I've been disappointed lately with the performance of my PIII-1.4S on WinXP lately. Specifically, mysterious services eat up […]
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So I've been disappointed lately with the performance of my PIII-1.4S on WinXP lately. Specifically, mysterious services eat up CPU, and random processes eat up both CPU and memory rendering the desktop experience a shadow of it's former self. Here are the specs:

ASUS TUSL2-C
PIII 1.4S Tualatin
512MB RAM
40GB HDD (Western Digital "JB" special edition)
SB Live-24bit (temp until to SB Audigy)
Geforce4 Ti-4600
WinXP-SP3

I am using a very similar system at the moment (I have a 9600XT instead of a Geforce, though) and I would also like to know why Windows XP SP3 is so frustratingly slow, considering performance with Win2K was at least satisfactory. I don't buy that there's some voodoo associated with "too many Windows updates" or SP3 itself – there was some discussion about this over at Re: Is Windows 2000 good for anything? . I'll believe it if someone generates empirical data.

On that note, what makes you think there are "mysterious services" and "random processes" ? Are you actually identifying anything in Task Manager or otherwise?

I have a perfectly good 3.2 GHz P4 that seems to run Windows 98SE without any problems; I'll switch over to that one of these days. The only real disadvantage is that there's no SB support in MS-DOS mode, but it's not like I really switch over to Windows 98 all that often anyway. Setting up a dual-boot with XP and 98SE is quite trivial if you want to go that route.

Don't patch it, just stay on SP2 and make sure your browser is up to date and you have it running a software firewall of some sort to block any vulnerable services that are running if its on a LAN (to stop Blaster type attacks). If you do those things then it will remain fast and also be relatively secure to the outside. Just don't do something stupid like running IE, having the Java browser plugin running, or sitting on an old version of Flash and you should be fine.

Think I would dualboot with Windows 98 and some random distribution of GNU+Linux. Especially if I wanted to hook the computer up to my network.

Slackware, Crunchbang, and Arch should work well enough I think (if you avoid heavier desktop systems like GNOME and KDE). Not so suitable for the inexperienced GNU+Linux user tho.

I would dual boot W98se and XPsp2 installed on 2 separate hard drives, and simply boot to the desired system in BIOS by toggling the applicable drive in the boot disk priority section.

If you have XP on an NTFS partition W98 won't be able to see it during an W98 session. But you can create a FAT32 partition on your XP drive to use for transferring data to/from XP from inside a W98 session.

This is the dual boot setup I use and find it works very quickly and sidesteps the need for boot manager software and fussy OS/driver installation. Clean and separate but they can swap data and 'talk' to each other if need be.

I keep Windows 98 and XP installed on separate primary partitions. When I'm using XP and want to switch to 98, I go into Disk Management and mark the 98 partition as Active. When I'm in 98 and want to switch to XP, I use the "gdisk" utility from Norton Ghost (though I'm sure there are free alternatives) to mark the XP partition as Active. And I use a FAT32 partition for XP, which probably has some disadvantages, but I'm not too worried about them.

But that's just a matter of personal preference and there's certainly nothing at all wrong with Mr. Tincup's method, to be clear.

To answer the questions of why SP3 and what services/processes I'm talking about, let me take a step back. This PC was a "daily driver" in the early 2000's. So it got all the latest updates etc.. including SP3 and new versions of IE back in the day. It was never rebuilt as a lean retro machine. It's just a survivor.

So when I say "mysterious services" I'm specifically referring to the frustration of watching task manager say "svchost.exe" is running hot without any idea just which service is the culprit. I know there are ways around that, but I haven't invested the time yet.

I don't play DOS games since I have true era correct retro PC's for that. Just Win32/DirectX games of the era (I specifically remember playing the heck out of Jedi Knight II on it).

So... I think I'll try to disable as many non-essentials services and start-up processes as possible. Failing that, I may do a re-install of XP SP2 and leave it at that. No linux. I have a VMWare ESX server with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux VM for all my linux needs.

Believe it or not, that P3-1.4S even has an old copy of Virtual PC on it. That's how I used to do a lot of my "vogons" tinkering ~12 years ago.

I generally have disfavored result when updating to XP SP3 on single core systems.
Some newer program may demands SP3, but such program almost always demand multi-core CPU.

Just posted my 3DMark 2001SE score for this machine as is in the 3DMark mega thread... just to see how it still stands up.

Re: My 3DMark01 Mega Thread

I had an almost identical setup back in 2001. I ended up sticking with Windows 2000 because of the memory requirements for Eckspee.

QBiN wrote:

So when I say "mysterious services" I'm specifically referring to the frustration of watching task manager say "svchost.exe" is running hot without any idea just which service is the culprit. I know there are ways around that, but I haven't invested the time yet.

Download Process Explorer and see which services the guilty svchost.exe is hosting and work from there.