Windows XP Home Edition


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I am running Windows XP RC1 on my Celeron 650 with 128mb ram at the moment and it is working fine.

I have another computer which is a Pentium II 233 with 64mb ram. I wanted to know if its worth upgrading it to Windows XP Home edition. I would obviously put some more ram in it. I think I saw someone who was running XP on a 233 and he was happy with it... or was I just dreaming? And how much ram do you think I should be putting in if I did?

Thanks,

Alan (DWZ)

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RAM isn't tied to processor speed, so if you think XP runs fine on your other system with 128 megs, you'll probably find it runs fine with the same amount on the other system.

Personally I'm using 256megs of RAM and I find my HD thrashes a bit yet because the ram is full and windows needs to write to the swap file. I'll be upgrading to 512 as soon as I purchase Home Edition.

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I think you'll find that 256MB is more than enough (for now, anyway). The reason it fills and starts using the swap file is due to Windows (up to Me)'s extremely poor memory management. I downloaded a program called CacheMaster and applied the "Standard User" settings. Also in CacheMaster, under System Tweaks, I ticked "Conservative Swap File Usage". That solved it. Now Windows unloads closed programs from RAM (!) and only uses the swap file when the main memory is really full, which is hardly ever.

On the original question, I think a 233 (with sufficient RAM) will run Windows XP (on my experience of previous Windows versions) but just rather sluggishly - windows taking ages to load, etc. I may be wrong, but that's what I suspect. When you try to run Win95 on a 486SX, for example, all you get is rather sluggish performance. It does work.

Hope this helps :)

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Originally posted by Timble  

On the original question, I think a 233 (with sufficient RAM) will run Windows XP (on my experience of previous Windows versions) but just rather sluggishly - windows taking ages to load, etc. I may be wrong, but that's what I suspect. When you try to run Win95 on a 486SX, for example, all you get is rather sluggish performance. It does work.

Hope this helps :)

Yeah, thanks. I keep my computers on 24/7 anyway :)
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I run WinXP on a Pentium 200 MMX clocked at 225 with 256mb RAM and it runs great. Must admit tho I took off all the fancy looking things cos it did slow it down a bit.

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Originally posted by goofydave  

I run WinXP on a Pentium 200 MMX clocked at 225 with 256mb RAM and it runs great. Must admit tho I took off all the fancy looking things cos it did slow it down a bit.

I knew someone around here had done it :)
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In This case graphics card will be an issue also, i had a beta of xp on my old cyrix 225Mhz pc it had 128 MB ram and a voodoo3 in it at the time. When i got a new pc and swapped the video to the new one, the cyrix with 192 MB of ram and onboard video was terribly slow running rc1 screen updates were the major problem. It'll run on there but i'd give it 192MB or 256 MB of ram to give the os a little extra room, rams cheap now get it while you can.

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Yeah, it should run fine if you disable all the crap like shadows on the cursor and menus... and if you don't use the new Luna GUI. This may "sound" pointless but XP is more stable and has better security so it IS worth doing.

I like XP... I use XP with 256RAM and a 7200RPM HD and find that it DOESN'T access the HD much . Anyway, you DON'T need 512RAM for WinXP... WinXp has better memory management and better swap file management.

PS - RC1 was INCREDIBLEY slow in comparison to RTM [RTM uses less than HALF the RAM that RC1 used for running Explorer]. Only judge XP on the FINAL version, not any other previous version!

-mortensenj

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