oh2ftu wrote on 2024-04-30, 05:28:
I finally got around to install Win98 and XP(sp3) on an SSD to that 3GHz P4. It sure pushes out some heat! 😀
Well, I see you're kind of far up North, so the added heat in your home is probably not a nuisance. 😉
That said, I don't think P4's are that hot as people tout them to be.
FWIW, I'm tTyping this post from a P4 "Presshot" PC right now. It idles at ~75 Watts of power (at the wall plug) and goes up to 130W under full CPU load. That's not too bad.
stanwebber wrote on 2024-04-30, 06:20:
i'm ran xp sp2 with a p4 2.8ghz northwood and radeon 9600 xt. i vote the radeon 95oo pro if you can unlock the pixel pipelines on a 256 width card.
Only if OP adds a 3rd party cooler on the Radeon 9500, though. 😉
Otherwise, those 9500/9700/9800 Radeons tend to die pretty quickly with their crappy stock coolers.
The Radeon 9600 is more robust... but I usually also add extra cooling to those as well (typically in the form of a fan blowing air across the cards with a passive heatsink.)
VivienM wrote on 2024-05-01, 00:24:
Then I would probably say that your hardware was bad or had bad drivers. Pre-SP2 XP was not great, but it certainly wasn't blue screen-heavy at all, at least on good hardware
+1
Sombrero wrote on 2024-04-30, 03:56:
That said SP3 does have plenty of things you may or may not need eating RAM, I've made a bat file to disable every service I personally don't need that I can easily run after installing XP and be done with it. It doesn't seem necessary per se, SP3 has always ran just fine without any issues with responsivity on my systems, but hey, if I don't need it then why have it running in the background.
+1 on this too.
I personally have been too lazy to make a stream-lined bat file to do these things, so I do everything manually on every system I set up. But indeed there are quite a few things that can be turned off to save system resources. Like you said, if it's not needed, why have it run in the background (essentially the complete opposite mentality of Windows 10/11, which is why I still avoid these OSes.)
Fortunately, XP is simple enough that I can configure everything I (don't) want in less than 30 minutes. Things like spooler service and wireless service regularly get turned off, unless I have a reason to leave them (e.g. if the system will be connected to a printer or will have a wireless connection.) And things like DNS service and help & support are always off and disabled. The former is actually a security risk, as even with a hosts file, malware and websites can still get around it. There's more, but no point in listing it here. I won't even mention automatic updates - those have always been set to OFF for any system in my possession.
dionb wrote on 2024-04-30, 13:31:
Modern computers? My main personal "XP SP3 was bloated and a pain" experience came from my Acer Aspire One 522 netbook with an anaemic AMD Ontario C-50 CPU. Bought it in early 2011, with 1GB RAM and Windows XP (including SP3) installed. It was barely usable. The OS itself loaded fine, but firing up application software (eg MS Office or Chrome/Firefox web browser) resulted in continual thrashing to its slow little 2.5" HDD. I at first assumed it was bloatware in Acer's build so I reinstalled vanilla XP, and it worked great. However I wanted my security patches so installed the service packs, and it was just as bad as before. I upgraded to 2GB RAM, which made it usable, but it wasn't fun. Then I installed Windows 7 which performed vastly better despite the very low-end specs of the machine. It lasted me (including a further upgrade to 4GB RAM) until the battery gave way and anyway websites had become too heavy for the C-50.
Or take the PC I built for free for a student association around 2003. It had a Pentium 3 with 384MB of RAM and ran XP with SP1 acceptably for the mainly administrative purposes they had. Then SP2 came along in 2004 which made it essentially unusable. We maxed the motherboard out at 1GB which improved slightly, but within a year they gave it back to me because it was not fit for their purpose anymore. The application software they used had not changed.
Do you actually have any technical data to back this up? Do you know exactly what changed before and after the updates? How were the computers set up initially and afterwards?
As someone who still does plenty of XP SP2 and SP3 installs on old/antiquated (Pentium 3 and early Pentium 4) hardware (and not just for retro purposes, but for actual use too), I'm having a real hard time believing that SP2/SP3 updates were the sole cause of this.
On older hardware at least, (~ Pentium 4 era), the difference in memory usage between SP0/vanilla, SP1, SP2, and SP3 is about 30-50 MB of RAM - that's on a clean install with no 3rd party software at startup (except drivers), and automatic updates disabled for a fair comparison. If you add ATI or nVidia drivers, the overhead will differ more, depending on the era of the GPU and version of the drivers.
I ran several much older systems (all Pentium 3 -based) as "daily drivers" until much later than anyone should have.
One of these was an HP Pavilion desktop that I found in 2009 on the street. It already had XP SP2 on it and ran miserably due to a ton of viruses and malware. Cleaned it up and increased the memory to 384 MB of RAM - the max its motherboard could take (Intel i815 chipset with 512 MB RAM limit, but silly HP BIOS couldn't handle more than 384.) Silly HP BIOS also kept the HDD in DMA2/ATA-33 mode only. I ran that system until 2013. Despite the hardware limitations, the system ran fairly snappy and XP booted very quickly (often faster than many people's C2D/Q and i5/i7 systems with Windows Vista / 7 at the time.) Online browsing was the only thing that progressively became slower and more painful over time... but that was due to "web 2.0" "maturing". Believe it or not, in 2009-2010, I could still watch Youtube at 480p on the 850 MHz Pentium 3 CPU in that system stutter-free (back when Flash was used instead of HTML5.) This was on Internet Explorer 6... which despite being quite outdated, was still not broken (dare I say even supported) on many websites, even when they explicitly warned that it wasn't. This didn't last too long, of course, and by mid-late 2010, it was impossible to use IE6 only. That's when I started experimenting with alternative browsers like Firefox. In comparison Firefox 3.x was slow and thrashed the HDD a lot. It also used a lot more memory. Further versions of FF were even worse in that regard... though FF24 reversed things a bit. I eventually moved to Opera (the original Presto engine one, not the Chromium-based garbage that it is now), which restored performance back to IE6 levels. Around 2012-2013, though, too many websites started pushing HTML 5 "standards" and became ridden with terribly-written Javascripts, making the system very hard to use online. Under the hood, though, I never moved the OS past SP2 and it always ran fine with that. Task Manager on the desktop after a boot reports around 100 MB of RAM usage (IIRC)... which is more or less inline with the results I get from other systems from that era, ranging from vanilla XP to SP2.
The other notable P3 system I used often as a 2nd/3rd daily driver was a Dell Latitude laptop with 512 MB of RAM. Got it in 2010 from an IT department cleanout from a local NGO office. I put a 20 GB HDD in it and performed a clean install of XP SP2. Ran that laptop until 2018 with various browsers (Opera 12 and FF24) to keep it going through the years. Opera 12 behaved fine and never went over the 512 MB of system RAM it had. But by 2018, it was not compatible with almost anything except a handful of select websites, so I also ran FF24 on the side. FF24 wasn't great in that regard either (also being quite outdated at that point.) However, the alternative - FF v40+ ESR - was a no-go on that little RAM. So FF24 it was... which was still a pig compared to Opera and wasn't hard to jump over 512 MB RAM usage with it. Once it did, system became super-slow and had to restart the browser (FF) to stop further thrashing. But apart from that, this laptop was also very snappy and booted very fast - to the extent that I had several people think I'm running an SSD in there. So it goes to show what a properly done clean SP2 install can be like when maintained over the years. It ran like this until the end, when eventually the HDD became corrupt in 2018 (can't blame it, it was a Hitachi Travelstar that constantly ran at 52-60C!) I managed to salvage the install, but it was not 100% right afterwards, so I ditched it. It bugged me that the laptop sat like this, as it was always a big part of my electronics workbench (used it a lot to look up datasheets)... so I put a 30 GB HDD in it and XP SP3. Ran about the same as it did before. Only visible differences to me were that SP3 added more secuiry-through-obscurity "annoyances", like displaying a warning every time I tried to play "blocked" MP3 files from the internet (i.e. my non-copyrighted music collection folder). But all in all, SP2 and SP3 are very much the same. The real difference between the two, and this is something I ran into while volunteering as an IT in an NGO, is how OOBE is handled on networked profiles and local profiles. For SP2, if you set up the admin account with certain features disabled, you can then make those changes to follow through to other networked profiles. With SP3, that's not exactly the same and we had a lot of issues with that in how we wanted a default network user login to look like on the desktop.
Anyways, I have plenty more systems I can give examples with, but I think I pushed this far enough off-topic than needed.
In any case, the whole "vanilla / SP1 XP is fast, SP2/SP3 is slow" argument is easy to debunk.
Also, don't forget that at the time of XP release, there wasn't that much "heavy" software and people didn't run too many programs on startup. In contrast, by the time SP2 rolled out, we had Steam, Skype, bloated "security" suites, driver updaters / registry cleaners, and many many more things (junkware) that were set to run at startup by default. Add automatic updates, and no wonder you'd get a disaster.
Do a clean SP2 or SP3 install on a system now, and you'd be surprised how well it runs. As noted above, I'm actually typing this message on a P4 system right now with XP SP2. It's the same system I set up back in 2013 to replace the HP desktop mentioned above. Thanks to modern browsers for retro PCs, I can still "do stuff" online (YT and social media is obviously out of the question.)
