Should I use XP on my "new" old notebook?

[BookWorm]

I just ordered an IBM ThinkPad 240. It's very small, and not very expensive because it's about 10 years old. It has a 400Mhz Celeron (not upgradable) and 320Mb of RAM. Age doesn't bother me; I'd have ordered an IBM PC110 if I could find one for less money, but they're rare and expensive. A PC110 would run '95, NT4, and OS/2.

The 240 will probably run 98SE2ME with a bunch of upgrades; OS/2 Warp 4.52 (Go ahead, flame me for mentioning it here. I like it anyway. ); and NT 5.x (2k or XP)

XP's system requirements are a little high, but are they too high? It's supposed to run at 300Mhz; some people won't install it on anything less tha 1Ghz. It's supposed to work in 256Mb of RAM; I've seen that and didn't like it.

How badly will XP (SP2 if any) run on this? Would I be better off with 2K?

[submix8c]

Any will/should do. You may want to use 2K instead of XP, but in either case as long as you don't have a bunch of background tasks/services running it should be fine. Temporarily running XP Pro SP3 on an old HP next to me - 500mhz Celery and 256mb RAM (RAM always helps) - for testing purposes; runs fine. 98SE or OS/2 will probably use less resources by default. If you have those four systems on hand, just try each in turn and make your own choice.

Edited February 12, 2010 by submix8c

[fdv]

400MHz chip, 320 RAM, I'd say nLiting Windows 2000 or using my fileset and HFSLIP is your best bet.

[jaclaz]

2K seems just right to me also.

If you only have XP, if you remove some of the fluff with nlite and remove the unneeded services, it should run (let's say conventionally "walk" ) decently as well.

It's a bit "asymmetric" IMHO, slow CPU/plenty of RAM, machines of that period usually have a 600 Mhz CPU and 128/256 Mb of Ram.

jaclaz

[menes]

I have 11 years old desktop PC, It's my first PC. Pentium-II, 400mhz, 320mb ram, Geforce4-MX440, Creative SB LiveValue.

I use XP Home SP3 nLited. I can watch movies, listen music, surf on internet, write DVD, play games, ex.

It's enought for basic things.

Just use nLite, It's very easy to make own installation. Don't worry.

XP as fast as W2K. Also you can use light apps which use less ram and cpu power.

I also have a newer notebook. I can able to setup and use Windows 7, but I don't have USB Modem driver for W7. So I use XP on that machine, too. It's good that XP supported by companies widely. You can find any drivers and softwares easily.

[BookWorm]

I'm leaning toward 2k, but with Windowblinds and the VistaPack or Revolutions Pack. I want 32-bit icons.

Are XP skins comparable to Windowblinds skins? Like Dark Marble II?

Does anyone here know of any really good antique style icon sets? I already have all of them from deviantart.com (twisted site, weird people) including the British Library set (WARNING:contains two obscene icons. Delete the "bookmarks" and "Miscellaneous - Config" without opening.) but I'm still looking for some good application icons.

Are there any other cool visual features (other than Rover the dog) in XP that are not added to 2k with the VistaPack? What other features does XP add? I heard they got rid of the Active Desktop.

I tried Desktop Sidebar and had a few problems. Does this gadget really require XP? What kind of desktop gadgets are available just for XP?

Basically I'm looking for a good reason to install XP instead of 2k. Since this is an XP forum, you must be XP fans, and have some reason to prefer it. Convince me.

[Martin H]

I don't know much about the visuals, but other than that, then for some:

• Improved performance of filesystem and registry handling.
  
• Improved performance of system calls.
  
• Improved multi-core support/supporting 2+ cores
  
• Faster startup, hibernate and resume.
  
• Driver rollback
  
• Cleartype
  

[BookWorm]

> * Improved performance of filesystem and registry handling.

> * Improved performance of system calls.

> * Faster startup, hibernate and resume.

> * Driver rollback

Sound like it should be faster, not slower. Maybe I should just clean out a bunch of background crud? My CPU is single core so that doesn't matter.

* Cleartype

What is that?

[jaclaz]

Some advantages :

• nice Icons, which is a good thing, as you will have more distractions and notice not the times it take to index your drives
  
• a login screen where you can put a small image for each users WOW!
  
• file searching with a nice animated dog using automatically wildcards, thus looking NOT for what you are looking for, but what the dog thinks more fit, which is a good thing, as you don't really know what you are looking for
  
• you won't be able to format most floppies, which is a good thing since floppies are pointless anyway
  
• you will need 1.5 Gb of space on HD minimum instead of 600 Mb, which is a good thing as you would have otherwise used that space for p0rn or warez
  
• slower access on FAT32 USB Mass Storage devices, which is a good thing so you will have more time to look at the pretty icons
  

Seriously, there are no "advantages" or "disadvantages" in an absolute way, and it is very easy to go on a flame war on this kind of topic, the two OS are very similar, being XP nothing more than a "modernized" 2K, with some better features and some worse ones, but it mostly depends on the eye of the beholder.

My personal advice is:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097216/quotes

Da Mayor: Doctor...

Mookie: C'mon, what. What?

Da Mayor: Always do the right thing.

Mookie: That's it?

Da Mayor: That's it.

Mookie: I got it, I'm gone.

jaclaz

Edited February 14, 2010 by jaclaz

[BookWorm]

> * nice Icons, which is a good thing, as you will have more distractions and notice not the times it take to index

> your drives

I've heard drive indexing can be disabled.

> * a login screen where you can put a small image for each users WOW!

I'll be the only user on the little 240, but I have a faster (and bigger) 770Z I might try this on too.

> * file searching with a nice animated dog using automatically wildcards, thus looking NOT for what you are

> looking for, but what the dog thinks more fit, which is a good thing, as you don't really know what you are

> looking for

I don't mind the silly dog - I even have MS Bob (a collectors item) - But I really *hate* being told what to do by the computer. This is why I still have my Tandy Color Computer 3. It does what *I* tell it to do.

> * you won't be able to format most floppies, which is a good thing since floppies are pointless anyway

That's not true. There are programs to format floppies. I'll just have to switch to TRS-80 formats.

> * you will need 1.5 Gb of space on HD minimum instead of 600 Mb, which is a good thing as you would have

> otherwise used that space for p0rn or warez

Actually I was going to use it for Beethoven's 9th and a few Mozart concertos. With A 320 gig drive I should have plenty of room.

> * slower access on FAT32 USB Mass Storage devices, which is a good thing so you will have more time to

> look at the pretty icons

Finally something I'm actually concerned about. How can I triple boot with MS-DOS 7.10 and 98SE2ME without FAT32? Will it be much slower on the main hard drive?

I'm also concerned about compatibility. I want to use a windows 3.1 shell called WinMate. It won't work with 2k, but XP is supposed to be a little more compatible with 9x stuff. Is that true?

[jaclaz]

Finally something I'm actually concerned about. How can I triple boot with MS-DOS 7.10 and 98SE2ME without FAT32? Will it be much slower on the main hard drive?

NO, don't worry, it applies only on USB devices.

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=125116

I'm also concerned about compatibility. I want to use a windows 3.1 shell called WinMate. It won't work with 2k, but XP is supposed to be a little more compatible with 9x stuff. Is that true?

NO.

If that thingy won't work on 2K there approximately 0.000000000001% probabilities it will work on XP.

jaclaz

[Martin H]

Many ppl think that XP is just an eye-candied 2k and nothing else, and yes, i agree that there are a bunch of useless background services and eye-candly fluff, but if disabling all of that crap, then there actually also are some REAL performance improvements...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc302206.aspx

IMHO, then one of the most important is better multi-core support + support for more than 2 cores...

The pre-fetching stuff though, i'm not a fan of personally and always disable as one of the first things...

Anyway, my point is that if disabling all of that cruft, then IMHO you'll get a system atleast as fast as a 2k system, but with additional much better app/driver support additionally!

As a final point, then i know that this is completelly subjective, but i've had my 2k system crach 2 times by reading a scratched backup disc, and not only crach(bsod), but also completelly borking the HDD partitions and not being able to detect them afterwards, whileass when doing the same on XP, then no bsod crash, and it just kept reading for an our or so(same drive and computer and updated drivers on both!)...

Edited February 14, 2010 by Martin H

[genu]

I know this topic is a little bit old but a couple of weeks ago i had a similar problem with an old compaq notebook from the year 2000. This notebook was a gift from a friend.

Machine specs:

Intel Celeron-A 400 Mhz

64 MB RAM

1 GB Harddisk

On that notebook windows 2000 was installed together with office 2000. Nothing else, even not a virus scanner. On that machine outlook needed round about 5-7 minutes to start. Even if you are patient this is a long time.

So i decided to run Windows NT 4.0 Workstation on that machine.

Biggest problem was usb because nt 4.0 has no native support and ms refuses support for nt 4.0 see here: Windows NT 4.0 does not support Universal Serial Bus.

But a Dell driver Everythingusb.com works for me. OK, it is only usb 1.1 but better than nothing.

This laptop is running fine as a typewriter and my outlook 98 starts within 30 seconds.