Minimal XP Install

[alt20]

Hi,

I have a really old laptop (~500MHz) that I need to be able to run Office 2003 on. As there doesn't seem to be any way of installing Office 2003 on Win98, I guess I have no choice but to install XP. So my question is:

What installation of XP should I use to allow it to run on my laptop:

- as quickly as possible

- with as small a hard disk partition as possible

Should I use home or pro? SP2 or not? Minimal or custom install?

Thanks

Alt

[woelfman10]

Only if you have at least 512MB of memory on your laptop should you install XP. 500MHz suggests that it may support up to 256MB, but probably has 128MB. Also, old laptop memory is expensive and it's probably not worth buying an OS upgrade and hardware upgrade for degraded performance. A lack of memory will force your computer to use its harddrive as memory, which very, very slow.

You can install Office XP or OpenOffice (which is free) on Windows 98. It's much cheaper that way and I think you'll get more for the money. OpenOffice would cost you the time to download it, so it's quicker than running to the store if you have broadband.

If you have your heart set on XP, check out the additional features that Pro has to offer. If you won't use them, then go for home. There's a few networking tools that install with pro automatically, but they're available on the home CD too (you just have to find and install them yourself). Also, XP Pro has dual processor support, but that isn't a usuable feature for you on that machine (making XP Home a more viable solution). If you buy a new copy Windows XP, it should come with SP2 integrated (which is good), which contains loads of security updates.

[Pensionada]

Hi,

I have a really old laptop (~500MHz) that I need to be able to run Office 2003 on. As there doesn't seem to be any way of installing Office 2003 on Win98, I guess I have no choice but to install XP. So my question is:

What installation of XP should I use to allow it to run on my laptop:

- as quickly as possible

- with as small a hard disk partition as possible

Should I use home or pro? SP2 or not? Minimal or custom install?

I have fooled around a lot with old slow systems as yours. As long as you are not expecting too much XP will run in 128MB, but a much better solution in your case would be to use Windows 2000.

I bet that Office2003 would run on W2K.

Btw, why would you want Office2003 rather than Office XP or even Office 2000? It really doe not bring much in my (humble) opinion.

[TheFlash428]

Office 2K3 will run on Windows 2000 (but it must be updated to SP4).

[alt20]

Thanks for the replies. Why do I want Office 2003? Put simply, it's what I use at home and at work, and I'd rather have the same version everywhere, so Office isn't constantly trying (and usually failing) to convert all my work between different versions!

Also, something I forgot to mention - I think in the light of how much my laptop will struggle just running XP and Office, I won't use it for anything else at all (will have a separate Win98 partition for emails etc...). As this means I won't be connecting to the internet in XP (hence ruling out most of the benefits of SP2 I guess), will SP2 be a help or hindrance to speed/hard disk space.

I'm not averse to the Win 2000 option though. Is it a much less resource-hungry operating system?

Edited April 10, 2006 by alt20

[alt20]

No-one?