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Which XP?

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Reply 60 of 102, by Asaki

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Definitely need a lot of RAM if you want to browse the web in XP >_< Everything is poorly programmed scripts, huge unscaled photos, and videos for no reason...I install NoScript, and I use mobile versions of the heavier sites.

Reply 61 of 102, by jade_angel

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It's freakish how much memory modern web browsing takes. Last night I had Chrome get OOM-killed on my Linux box because it had gobbled through 20GB of RAM.

Browser dies because it's chewed through more RAM than my whole school district had disk storage in 1997. What the heck?

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Reply 63 of 102, by notsofossil

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jade_angel wrote:

It's freakish how much memory modern web browsing takes. Last night I had Chrome get OOM-killed on my Linux box because it had gobbled through 20GB of RAM.

Browser dies because it's chewed through more RAM than my whole school district had disk storage in 1997. What the heck?

What sites and how many tabs? I use Firefox 50 and upwards of 8 tabs and at worst it'll use up a gigabyte of RAM on XP SP3. I don't do Facebook or Twitter or other popular trash sites, maybe they eat up a ton of RAM.

I do notice Waterfox on 64-bit Windows can be a RAM hog though. I've seen it use up 2GB easy. I haven't tried using a newer version of Linux, got turned off by Gnome resembling Windows 8.

Ironically, Firefox 3.6.28 on Windows ME can work perfectly fine on as little as 512MB RAM. It's a lot for WinME, but it's tiny compared to 20GB. Maybe the problem you're having is caused by modern Linux (also Windows) and modern Chrome being pure bloatware.

jarreboum wrote:

Does that mean it gets better with SP3 on Pentium 4 and AMD64?

It was painfully slow on a P4, I upgraded the whole PC up to a Core 2 Duo, massive improvement.

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Reply 64 of 102, by Jorpho

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jarreboum wrote:

Does that mean it gets better with SP3 on Pentium 4 and AMD64?

The article at http://www.zdnet.com/article/xp-sp3-performan … ite-home-about/ suggests that SP3 does offer a modest performance improvement.

(I never noticed until now that that article actually includes "XP RTM" in the testing. Hmm.)

Reply 65 of 102, by jade_angel

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notsofossil wrote:
What sites and how many tabs? I use Firefox 50 and upwards of 8 tabs and at worst it'll use up a gigabyte of RAM on XP SP3. I do […]
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jade_angel wrote:

It's freakish how much memory modern web browsing takes. Last night I had Chrome get OOM-killed on my Linux box because it had gobbled through 20GB of RAM.

Browser dies because it's chewed through more RAM than my whole school district had disk storage in 1997. What the heck?

What sites and how many tabs? I use Firefox 50 and upwards of 8 tabs and at worst it'll use up a gigabyte of RAM on XP SP3. I don't do Facebook or Twitter or other popular trash sites, maybe they eat up a ton of RAM.

I do notice Waterfox on 64-bit Windows can be a RAM hog though. I've seen it use up 2GB easy. I haven't tried using a newer version of Linux, got turned off by Gnome resembling Windows 8.

Ironically, Firefox 3.6.28 on Windows ME can work perfectly fine on as little as 512MB RAM. It's a lot for WinME, but it's tiny compared to 20GB. Maybe the problem you're having is caused by modern Linux (also Windows) and modern Chrome being pure bloatware.

It's mostly Chrome and the fact that I had Netflix, Facebook and several other notorious heavyweights running in a whole ratload of tabs (multiple windows on multiple virtual desktops), and that I'd had the browser running for a few weeks. That's not the kind of thing that typically happens - I was more thunderstruck that it can happen at all. If I stay away from the really stupid sites, memory usage pretty much never goes much over 4GB, and that's with me being somewhat profligate - windows everywhere, tabs everywhere. I know some folks keep their browsers assiduously trimmed down to one or two tabs, but I'd probably only do that if I had to.

As for modern Linux and bloat, I'm running Gentoo, so with a few exceptions, I'm mostly not saddled with any cruft I didn't want (other than PulseAudio, which I grudgingly gave up on trying to excise). Some other distros do pull in the kitchen sink whether you want it or not, though. I'm not wild about Gnome, that's for sure. There are reasons I'm sticking with XFCE, belike (and it's not because I'm running on underspec hardware).

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Reply 66 of 102, by jarreboum

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Jorpho wrote:
jarreboum wrote:

Does that mean it gets better with SP3 on Pentium 4 and AMD64?

The article at http://www.zdnet.com/article/xp-sp3-performan … ite-home-about/ suggests that SP3 does offer a modest performance improvement.

(I never noticed until now that that article actually includes "XP RTM" in the testing. Hmm.)

The comparison with XP RTM is really interesting. It seems SP3 restores the performances of original XP on lower end machines, cancelling the problems you guys noticed with SP2 compared to XP RTM. For lower end machines, there doesn't seem to be any reason not to upgrade, and it allows to connect to the internet if needed. More powerful machines have a slightly longer boot time and file copy time with SP3, the rest is equivalent (but the numbers are much better simply for using a better computer.)

In any case, the choice should be between original XP and SP3.

Reply 67 of 102, by Asaki

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jade_angel wrote:

It's freakish how much memory modern web browsing takes. Last night I had Chrome get OOM-killed on my Linux box because it had gobbled through 20GB of RAM.

Oh yeah, Chrome is terrible in that regard, worse than Opera. It's funny that they're both touted as being the fastest browsers, but after 20 minutes, it won't matter because your RAM is all gone =) And I've only got 768 MB on this machine! (my desktop is down for repairs)

I've always found IE to be the most RAM friendly, but obviously you wouldn't want to go that route in XP anymore. Firefox holds up alright.

notsofossil wrote:

I don't do Facebook or Twitter or other popular trash sites, maybe they eat up a ton of RAM.

Definitely two sites where you would want to use the mobile versions >_<

Reply 68 of 102, by dr_st

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Touting Chrome as the fastest browser is so 2010. 😁

Most of the benchmarks comparing browser speed are artificial anyways. In practical usage, I have never found any noticeable differences in rendering speed between the mainstream browsers back when they were actively comparing them. Usually most of the wait is for the content to download. Then there are the heavy videos, which are very CPU/GPU-intensive, but their performance depends on external plugins and not so much the browser.

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Reply 69 of 102, by sf78

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Anyone tried Firefox Nightly on XP? I think it has/had a 32-bit download that might work. I use it on Win10 and with 10 tabs open and Youtube running in background playing HD video it only takes around 400 Mb of RAM.

Reply 70 of 102, by Asaki

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I'm hovering around 320MB right now in the stable build (not nightly), but considering I only have 768 megs of RAM, it's not very hard to eat it all up with the right (wrong?) websites.

One of these days I need to max it out to a gig, but I'm sure I'll still complain =)

Reply 71 of 102, by notsofossil

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Which Windows are you using? On the right hardware, Windows ME can support a maximum of 1GB RAM.

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Reply 73 of 102, by gerwin

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notsofossil wrote:
http://www.vogons.org/download/file.php?avatar=33173_1460017432.gif Which Windows are you using? […]
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file.php?avatar=33173_1460017432.gif
Which Windows are you using?

Vista.

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🤣

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Reply 75 of 102, by notsofossil

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gerwin wrote:

We're going to die!!

I can see WinFLP being handy for truly old platforms like P2 or P3-based PCs, but the foggy legality makes me hesitant to deploy it on my systems. I've just stuck with good old Windows XP Professional SP2 for older systems and SP3 for newer ones.

One Windows XP I almost never hear anything about is Windows XP Home Edition. Is it nothing more than a feature-reduced Professional, or does it have some low end PC benefit to it? If I had an actual Home install CD, I would use it to make use of occasional Home product keys.

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Reply 76 of 102, by Azarien

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notsofossil wrote:

One Windows XP I almost never hear anything about is Windows XP Home Edition. Is it nothing more than a feature-reduced Professional, or does it have some low end PC benefit to it? If I had an actual Home install CD, I would use it to make use of occasional Home product keys.

I don't think there is performance benefit to XP Home. It's just XP missing some "enterprise" features: no Remote Desktop server (the client is still there), dumbed down file sharing (this sucks), no gpedit.msc (this sucks too) etc.

Reply 77 of 102, by Scraphoarder

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Wouldnt RDP from a XP or even Win 9x PC to a more modern machine to browse the web etc solve most worries about security and browser performance? The RDP client for Win 9x i think still is compatible with Win7 pro and probably Win10 aswell. I use often at work RDP from some legacy XP and W2003 systems to my Win10 PC to check things on internet and download stuff.

Reply 78 of 102, by dr_st

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Yes, it's totally possible. If the remote is inside your LAN, it should work fairly well without delays/slowdowns, but then the question is - why wouldn't you just use that system as your main system. I've actually been doing that for time to time for work - connecting from an XP machine through RDP over VPN into a Win7/8.1 machine to perform some tasks / run some programs that won't run on XP. It worked fairly well, except of course I could not use high-bandwidth activities like streaming high quality video.

You can also do the opposite - run XP in a VM inside a faster and more capable system. These are two sides of the same solution. Depending on your primary usage model, one or the other may be better tailored to your needs.

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Reply 79 of 102, by Tetrium

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Personally I don't think Home is really a bad a choice compared to Pro as both will work fine for most intended purposes.

And it also depends on what one has available. For me, some of my boards use an OEM disk that is basically nothing more than an full XP install disk which will auto-activate on specific OEM motherboards (my personal favorite is Fujitsu Siemens) and as most OEM disks are Home, I will probably continue use Home on those rigs. Of course there are other ways but one will need an install medium that doesn't require activation. Most of these are Pro.

I think XP will make a very good retro OS one day, if not already. XP is extremely compatible with a very wide array of hardware and software (including games which is what most of us here care about), it's easy to tweak with an extremely large knowledge base to be found on the internet (and why is my auto spelling checker complaining about the word "internet" 🤣!).

I've also run XP in Virtual PC, mostly to try out my auto install disks before burning them to actual install media (I used ISO files).

One can say about XP all one wants, but to me XP has been a fantastic OS and will continue to be fantastic.

One hardly ever hears about Home as people (somewhat rightfully, lets be honest here) saw Pro as a superior option and this is true when looking at both Pro and Home in a side by side comparison. But imo Home is absolutely NOT a bad OS. It's not comparable like 98FE and 98SE are compared.

Win 2k is a different story. I want to like it but I can't help but like XP more. But otoh there's so many people here who obviously like Win2k that there just has to be more to it, even though I personally might not see these benefits as is.

I don't really think Home as any significant advantages over Pro, but the disadvantages are not really something that important that I would be inclined to prefer Pro over Home. I just grab whatever works and be done with it. Both work for what I expect of them so I don't really care which version I use.

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