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Windows XP on an old Pentium lll.


lolnousernameforyou

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  • 2 months later...

Too bad it's not a modern contender, but I feel Windows 2000 Professional would have been PERFECT for such a machine; it would run substantially better than Windows XP Professional, no?

The issue here is not the OS on itself.

XP is actually 2000 (with a very few nice things and a full load of bloat and unneeded bells & whistles added to it).

I still run several "old" machines with either 2K or XP and the real issue IMHO is amount of RAM needed.

With a few tweaks (disabling of not really needed or useful services) the amount of processor and RAM use is comparable BUT as soon as you add an Antivirus (more or less *any* of them) and some of the programs used today, you will soon find yourself in needing to double or triple the RAM.

I have a "reference" oldish laptop that multiboots into DOS, Windows Me (yes, I know ;)), NT 4.00 and Windows 2000 with a Pentium 600Mhz and 128 Mb of RAM that - believe me - has always run smoothly or smoothly enough for doing the things that i needed it for.

I tried a "FredDeVorked" (i.e. without IE) XP on it once and it didn't seem that bad either.

But I also tried to install on it's 2K system an Antivirus (and not a particularly "resource hungry" one) and use it for some (very "light") internet browsing an BAM! completely unusable, disk swapping at it's best all the time!

jaclaz

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The only major issue (pending, mostly, really, not yet very actual) is things that need SSE2.

One of my main machines is a 3 GiB RAM Athlon XP 3200+ (so, likewise, no SSE2 or higher).

All I need works OK in it, except the Linux versions of Flash 11.x (for some reason *just for the linux versions* v. 11.x requires SSE2), so I'm stuck with the last Flash 10, which is v 10.3.183.68, for running linux. Moreover, PaleMoon for Windows dropped non-SSE2 machines at 3.6.32, so I'm stuck with it, too, and that's somewhat more serious, because PaleMoon is my main browser (but I can move on to Firefox ESR, for instance, if needed). As it is, PaleMoon 3.6.32, plus IE8 (spoofed to say it's IE9) and the latest Opera 12.16 have been enough to satisfy my needs... but it's far from clear for how long that'll continue to be so.

Of course, this is just a heads up... we should keep everybody posted on the status of this issue, but it still remains no endgamer, at this point.

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I have found that Windows XP SP3 can't be trimmed as small as SP1 for low memory systems. SP1, being XP, can run more new applications than Win2k (relatively new drivers such as nVidia video drivers, including most that err out on EncodePointer). An anti-virus might not be needed depending on who (and how) uses the computer. Perhaps one could rely on most other people scanning for viruses in files published on the web, and using an online service for on-demand checks.

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I owned an ex-fleet Pentium 3 (Coppermine @ 799MHz) machine from mid/late 2008 (September) to January 2010. It originally came to me with Windows XP Professional SP1. Having been in that environment, I am unsure why it missed the updates that were rolled out on the network at the time. I even knew which machine it *was* before it came to me :-)

I LOVED it! Windows XP ran smooth-as-silk on there, even with MS Office 2000 and *just* 384Mb of RAM. I could even do some light gaming on there (Think Midtown Madness 1/2 or V-Rally).

However, I broke down in June/July 2009 and put Windows 98SE and Ubuntu 8.xx or 9.xx on there. Finding all the drivers was a challenge, since I wasn't prepared, and thought the computer *should* have native support for Windows 98SE (being that Windows 98 was installed when it was new around 2000 or so). But the computer loved that even more.

So my recommendation is if you do choose to run XP, perhaps choose the OEM or SP1 version, as this is free from the "Security Centre" bloat, and numerous M$ "Band-Aids" that only worsened some of the system's glitches. If you use the Internet, use Clam-Win for frequent AV scanning or maybe something else that has live scanning.

Provided you browse SAFELY with a reasonably modern browser (Firefox, Chrome, Opera) with AdBlocker/Tracking-Blockers, you should be okay without Anti-Virus software. I was using Xp Pro SP1 on an old laptop for over a year without Anti-Virus without being compromised. Eventually I was, though I don't recall how it happened. Probably visisted a shady site for some computer software... Although after that, the XP Installation decided to "kaput" just days after I removed the malicious software.

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