Re: XP great for old machines
- From: "t.cruise" <t__cruise@[NoSpam]hotmail.com>
- Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2006 19:34:43 -1000
384 MB of RAM for a Vista system would be like running Windows 98 with 56 MB of RAM.
Regardless of what MS says the minimum is, I would not attempt to run Vista 32 bit with
less than 1 GB of RAM, and 2 GB for the 64 bit version. Also, the graphics intensive GUI
will require a display adapter with stats that probably neither of those old systems could
meet. Probably much hardware, and many peripherals will be orphaned as well. It is my
understanding that after much time in beta, that the development team a few months back
scrapped a large portion of the Vista code. After reading some of what was written in
forums and news groups, it seemed to me that the consensus was that although there are
changes to the GUI, and a few new things (not really new, like tabs in I.E., which
Firefox/Thunderbird introduced a few years ago), not many were wild about Vista. PC users
are more savvy these days. A new GUI, and a few other functions which can now be gotten
from third party software for Windows XP, does not seem to be enough incentive for the
average user to spend hundreds of dollars upgrading to Vista from Windows XP. I digress,
it is most probable that systems built for Windows 98 and Windows ME would not be an easy,
or inexpensive upgrade for Vista. When Vista is released, it would probably be less
expensive to purchase the Dell special of the week with Vista preloaded, on a week when
memory is doubled, shipping is free, and there are other freebies as well, then spending
just as much, or more to upgrade an older system to Vista. Unless there are some drastic
changes to the Vista OS and its applets, I will probably wait for Vista SP2.
--
T.C.
t__cruise@[NoSpam]hotmail.com
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"Ed Light" <nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:Sssgg.11078$KB.20@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
I've now converted two machines to XP from win 98 and win Me, and I'm amazed
at how much better they run. Especially, on the Win 98 machine, which took
many seconds to load huge 20 and 40 mb mailboxes in Outlook Express, even
when compacted and defragged. In XP with NTFS the same mailboxes load right
up.
In both cases I sent for more memory but went ahead and installed and
configured everything with 128 mb. That was a bit laggy, but it was usable.
The added 512 for one and 256 for the other really livened things up. The
one with 384 mb total has typically 100mb free.
The machines were K7's -- A Tbird 1000 and an Athlon XP running at 1500+
speeds. Judging from the 1000, I would say that a Duron 700 could run XP
just fine in 384 mb.
I haven't tried 256 mb alone, but that is how much is used after boot on my
2 gig system, so I suspect it would lag a bit without some headroom.
While on 128 mb one was much faster -- I think it was because it had a 7200
rpm disk and the other has a 5400 rpm one. With all the swap file action,
that could explain it.
Those old machines may not be up to heavy video and games, but for surfing
they are snappy.
Of course you can run into disadvantages, such as bios that don't know
anything about usb hard drives, and have usb 1.1, and no built-in nic and an
aversion to a pci one, though it might work ok in a different slot.
In my installs I used bootitng to create a small partition to install to,
then as I went I kept copying it to free space, so that when I hit a snag
and something bombed I deleted the XP and went back to a copy. I could have
booted a copy, but I copied the copy back into XP's space so the copy would
protect my next move. I wound up with a pristine, never locked up, never had
a bad driver or program install, XP. I imaged it to free space, slid the
image to the end of the drive, and resized XP to fill up the rest of the
disk.
Boy are those folks I did it for happy!
I don't know if you'll be able to do this with Vista Basic.
The one weird thing is the message that pops up and then disappears before
you can read it, on shut down. But I guess there has to be a Windows-ism or
two.
So I'm hoping those installs take years to deteriorate to the point where
we'll extract all the data and restore them from the image, then copy in the
new data.
BTW besides all documents I had backed up the e-mail store, address book,
and favorites. They copy in fine in safe mode. I replaced the default e-mail
store after recreating the accounts. I used the new address book to import
the old one. I copied in the favorites. You just have to find where they all
are.
--
Ed Light
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