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Win2000 Still Performs on 8-year-old Hardware
Daniel Iversen writes "Still 95% compatible with Windows XP, The Windows 2000 OS still runs very well on very old hardware - hardware with low specs it was never even meant to run on (tech setup guide - not a review). The broad question is, does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?"
I've read it here on Slashdot dozens of times.
does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?
Uhh... no?
No! I mean, Yes! Wait....No!
The broad question is, does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?
Of course. Why do you think Windows XP is designed to make people throw their computers away? Microsoft has to make up lost ground after the Windows 2000 debacle.
95% = 19/(2*2*5)
2000 = 2*2*2*2*5*5*5
The two points learned from this article:
1) A previous version of Windows, with less bloat, runs better on hardware with less resources to accomodate the bloat of future versions.
2) If you turn off practically everything, it'll use up a whole lot less memory.
Well, anyone with even a shred of common sense regarding computers should already be aware of those facts...so what purpose does the article serve, other than the rather mediocre instructional value?
The broad question is, does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?
Yep. My dad and many other *average* pc shoppers don't know that W2K can run on 8 year old hardware.
-- jimmycarter
A slashdot article that praises the durability of a microsoft product? Is the world coming to an end?
*looks outside*
Four horsemen of the apocalypse... check! Carry on then...
I would argue that if anything this if anything helps pc sales. Why? because if you don't like xp for what ever reason and have to go with a windows enviorment, you can always fall back on windows 2k.
Planned obsolescence is not a virtue. Why is not buying new hardware a bad thing? That's what the question implies.
What I say does not represent the views of my employers, my friends, my cats, or myself.
without patches (or firewall), the box wouldn't be online very long. DCOM, LSASS, GDI+, lots of bugs.
Well, Linux runs well on older hardware too. Infact, the older...the better!
Btw, Linux also runs on toasters, coffee machines, ipod's etc.
Just because someone can drag themselves through a decathalon with a broken leg doesn't mean they're going to be fast, effective or ejoy doing so. I don't see Pentium scaling back their development teams because Win2k was a smooth OS that brought life to the unwieldly Win95-capable hardware.
I'd think it impedes sales just about as much as making hardware that keeps working longer than six months.
The Compatibility w/ older HW/SW is a good thing from a marketing standpoint, but all of the older drivers and antiquated forms of data access to/from these legacy devices does put restrictions on what the OS can do TODAY. In short, the need to support such a wide, disparate spectrum of devices and technologies hampers the OS to be as fast and efficient as it COULD be, if support for these older devices and formats were removed.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Whenever I need a little extra juice for a new fangled Win2k app I just hit my turbo button. I should get a few more good years out of this old PC...
The answer is no, unless you don't mind running with crappy graphics and no sound.
No, but it does impede XP sales.
At work we just bought a rather sizable chunk of Win2K licenses so that we could upgrade older systems from Win98 without taking the performance hit that we were expecting from XP. Plus since I'm more familiar with Win2K than XP, managing the network is easier for me without having to re-learn where they hid all the settings AGAIN.
-Pope Peter Porker, S.O.W., K.M.K.R., U.G.O.A., F.S.G.S.D.
I don't think today's typical applications would run too well on 8-year-old hardware. It may be possible, but I think it would be generally more cost-efficient to just upgrade just a little bit. It would be more efficient in time and power consumption, not to mention better at preserving your sanity.
Well I am impressed that it worked but I don't think it's going to imped PC sales at all. I get a new computer about once every year and a half. I still have my old computers, right back to the my frist one from 1993. I still use them all. It's amazing what you can do with old hardware. As long as technology keeps increasing I'll be buying new computers because to be honest, the current ones still don't run fast enough for me.
People are not hip to upgrading nearly as often as OEMs would like. Most people (non-power users) keep a system for 5-7 years. Gamers are the exception to this, as are Mac people. Marketing only affects those who can see it. Most people are not reading Slashdot or computer sites. They are busy getting spyware from the porn and fantasy football sites.
If Windows runs well on 10-year-old hardware, more power to it.
Still very compatible with Mac OS X, OS 9 still runs very well on very old hardware - hardware with low specs it was never even meant to run on. The broad question hasn't stopped Macintosh sales.
Go to the w3.org and put Slashdot.org through the validator.
Microsoft is placing Windows 2000 on the lost species list so in a couple of years you will have 2 seconds from you boot a fresh install of Windows 2000 with all the latest patches until it bombs when hit by 100 new vulnerability xploits. Server hardware is no longer becoming useless after 2 years so we make sure the operating systems are. Next OS will require multicore and 3GB memory, Keep the industry going you know...
-1 flamebait.
Nerds won't have to buy new PCs. People in the mainstream will have to throw their PCs away as they would rather upgrade than spend money on virus removal.
Also, expect some sort of "super-virus" to force everyone to upgrade to the next version of windows. The purpose behind this is to make sure that everyone has DRM enabled(i.e. crippled) computers.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
This is a machine that has everything stripped out of it, including service releases and associated security patches, networking code, etc.
As Gates knows so well, feature competition on new systems is just as much related to security as bells-and-whistles. As long as hackers are breaking OSs, you'll need more and more code to plug the leaks. In fact, you'll probably end up with ten times as much security code as feature code. It shouldn't be that way, but there it is.
Politics: More Annoying Than Commercials?
The broad question is, does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?
Yes, it does. Hence Longhorn's ridiculous recommendations for 3Ghz and 512 MB of RAM to display windows on the screen. What exactly is it doing that requires 3Ghz? It's a ploy to push people to buy new computers. Microsoft is even recommending simply purchasing new computers to run Longhorn instead of upgrading on older machines. Uh-huh.
Linux and OS X, with few exceptions, get faster with each release. It's a nice feeling that OS X Tiger made my iBook 1Ghz faster.
The bigger question is, with all of Longhorn's technologies being backported to XP, in addition to its ludicrous system requirements, what's the point of upgrading to Longhorn at all? A new Direct3D shell that finally got OS X's translucence and window warp effects?
"Sufferin' succotash."
Until the hard drive crashed last month I was running Win 2K on this old Fujitsu Lifebook D765X Pentium Laptop. My sig other took the "good" laptop to Nova Scotia, so I travelled to San Francisco with this one.
Although slow, the machine actually ran quite OK, even logging into wireless networks and surfing the 'net. Office '97 ran just dandy, as did everything else that I usually have installed.
Pentium 166, 48 megs RAM. Stable as a rock.
I doubt very much that XP would even install on this machine, but 2K was happy as a clam.
Three Squirrels
I don't think this will impede hardware sales at all. People always want what is new, fast and flashy. Most users aren't looking for the most productivity for their dollar, and hence buy systems with much more power then they will ever need. It is like this in all areas, thats why people tend to buy new cars even when their rusty car still runs fine.
Voice your opinion!
My employer thankfully just bought us new 3.2 GHz PCs to replace our 1 GHz machines with Win 2K from 2001.
Screw compatible, I need to get my work done today. Those old PCs were painfully slow running Win2K. Even just simple resizing of photos in Photoshop was asking a lot.
Combine that with the fact that the interface on XP is still inconsistent crap compared to OS X, and things still take too long to accomplish.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
Yes, it does impede sales. However, that's just part of the equation. PC hardware seems to walked into the Land of Diminishing Returns. The extra cost of new hardware doesn't seem justified when the systems that people have work fast enough them. If your computer does everything you want it to, why upgrade?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
and what they want to do with the computer and what they want to use it for. You bet you can get away with doing your email and typing up your resume with an older PC..
But I dont think alot of people doing graphic work want to be on an older slower PC, as well the gamers certainly dont want to be fraggin at 5 FPS.
You cant really make a blanket statement about it hurting sales since people have different uses for computers.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
I have the latest Slackware release running on 10-year old hardware. I also have the latest Ubuntu release running on 2-year old hardware... one runs pretty horribly slow and the other blisteringly fast. Given the choice and the increasing inexpensiveness of hardware... I'm going to hazard a guess and say it probably doesn't impede sales too much. Besides, when Longhorn's released it'll probably give consumers an incentive to upgrade (don't hurt me, just going by trends!) :)
Who cares?
Namely who cares about the question posed to start this thread... I sure as hell don't have 8 year old hardware... or want to waste time experimenting by running an OS that wasn't meant to be run on there.
I'm not fond of MS but I'm not sure how this all fits into anything for justifying that position.
Who cares... waste of time, typing, browsing (this thrad).
-M
The writer of this article is a little strange if he considers a P233 old hardware. Back when Windows 2000 came out (1999, kids) I was using a P233 as my primary machine.
He makes one excellent point at the end: memory. Memory is what Windows needs more than anything. Once you remove all the cuddly crap, Windows 2000 and XP runs perfectly well on a classic Pentium so long as it has 128Mb or more. Preferably 256 with XP.
I've never tried XP or 2000 on a 486, but I would be willing to bet it'd run fine (NT certainly did). Anyone else tested this?
Is it surprising that a 5-year-old operating system still runs 8-year-old hardware? That's the hardware for which the operating system was designed!
A more pertinent question, I think, would be whether 2000 still runs with full support for new hardware devices, and whether that forward-compatibility hampers new OS sales.
and I installed Win2k P on a cyrix P166 w/ 24mb edo ram :/ last week.
where is my slashdot article.
Nothing to see here, move along now.
Not when the software runs like shit. You ever try running a current version of AIM on hardware a decade old on Windows 98? It's not pleasant. I'd say they have more to fear from linux, since a Redhat 8.0 installer has everything you'd need, and runs great on older hardware.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
I don't see a big performance hit on XP, but it IS nice to be able to upgrade a Win2K box without worrying about it refusing to run until it phones home to the mothership.
Will it run on my Apple IIe? I know that sounds ridiculous, but I had someone ask me just the other day if the new Apple PowerBooks ran Windows...
Compatible with 95% of things.. so 1 in every 20 applications won't work.
Sounds like rather a lot to me.
I see no reason why, if you design your API correctly and extensibly in the first place, with good modularisation, your OS shouldn't be compatible with code in 50 or 100 years time, let alone 5. Backwards compatibility is useful. Especially in computing where projects are rarely maintained beyond the second or third stable release. I don't quite see why moving forward should necessarily leave old applications broken.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I think real innovation is what hurts PC sales. I use a Win 2k machine w/ 233 Mhz and 128 mb of RAM at home for wireless web surfing, and it does everything I need to do (I'm not a gamer). Nothing that really matters to me has come out lately that makes me need to upgrade my home machine. Win 2000 is a fine OS, and works well for normal use. If they come up with something truely new and innovative I may upgrade, but not until then.
does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?
Sure it does. Are we looking for someone to blame? How about the hardware industry, for spending all that money to make speedy whizbang processors and huge warehouselike hard drives that hardly anybody needs?
It's the land of the brave, and the home of the free
Where the less you know, the better off you'll be.
I have compared several versions of Windows and several Linux distros including Debian and Gentoo on various old computers including Pentium IIs. Both Linux distros are significantly outperforming all Windows versions including Win2000 across more or less comparable applications e.g. Gimp and Photoshop. In fact I would describe Windows 2000 on anything older than a Pentium III slow as a snail while Debian is still quite snappy and responsive.
From the TFA: How to use the computer on a daily basis ;) it's not going to happen on your computer!
Gee, I wonder why people buy new PCs?
You could of course run Linux on your old machine and have some choices, applications-wise, and not run vulrunable to security breaches, but who want that when you can have a bare-bones Win 2K system?
Don't install a lot of application
Only have 1 application open at a time if possible
Don't work with big (1MB+) files (documents, images etc)
Don't apply O/S patches for security stability or other things.
Don't envy people who has newer software than yours or desktop wallpapers for that matter
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
I've installed windows 2000 on a pentium 90 before, this article is ridiculous. 233mhz is plenty to run Win2k.
It wouldn't boot off the CD so I had to make 6 floppy boot discs just to get into the setup, but my friend and I finally got it intalled. That same install lasted on there for quite some time before the computer was finally replaced (it was business-use running old dos programs and word, essentially)
If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
Since so many people keep Macs for so long, that's why the ~15% "installed base" number only translates into a ~3% "market share" number.
If people needed to buy new machines more frequently, the market "churn" would be higher.
It sounds like this is applicable to both Wintels and Macs now....
I've often wondered if in five years we'll be at a point where Windows XP gets to the same point as Windows 2000, where we'll have 6GHZ P5s in the new computers and they'll be running Longhorn, and companies will keep XP on their computers because it *just works* and the cycle will be complete.
I use XP right now just because SP2 has a better wireless configuration tool and because it has more bug fixes (and yes, I would probably upgrade from SP1 to try the new IE, just because I'm a browser whore.
A quick google search shows that I'm not alone in this endeavor.
Could this open some eyes and increase interest in alternative (Linux, Mac) offerings?
Making Windows 2000 run (rather well) on only 32MB RAM
.. and you would have more than 10 MB RAM left for your applications. The system responsiveness is rather fast.
;)
- By Daniel Iversen, 16 July 2005
People say it cannot be done... others say it should not be done...
The fact is that it can and should (sometimes) be done... installing Windows 2000 on very old computers with only 32 megabytes (MB) of memory (RAM). I've seen 64 and 96 MB RAM computers struggling with Windows 2000 but if you configure the system correctly it can run fast and well. Note though that there is no "magic bullet". Although your old computer can run faster it will never compete with modern hardware in terms of performance.
This is a short guide to show you how to run Windows 2000 on such old computers and maintain a fast perfroming system.
The computer I installed Windows 2000 on was a Toshiba Libretto 110 sub-notebook with 233 Mhz and 32 MB RAM.
Why would you do that?
I had an old but very leight-weight small subnotebook that I needed for after hours support for one of my clients... I needed to install Windows 2000 to use my mobile phone as a modem to access the high speed 3G data network. Your reason might be that you have an old PC you don't want to throw away and Windows 95/98/Me might not give you the features you are looking for... be aware though that if Windows 98 meets your needs it is stupid to upgrade because you have lots less memory to work with when installing Windows 2000.
FACTS
Before the tweaks in this document
Windows 2000 would startup/boot in 30 seconds and you would have between 3-4 MB RAM left for your applications. The system responsiveness is sluggish.
AFTER the tweaks in this document
Windows 2000 would startup/boot in 10 seconds (using hibernation) - which is faster than my 2.4Ghz/400MB laptop
Performance post tweaks in this guide
Figure 1: The performance of my old subnotebook after tweaks
THE GUIDE
Install the plain Windows 2000 operating system oin the computer.
Keep in mind:
* DONT install an extra service pack (they can offer perfromance and reliability improvements on faster computers but on old computers with few tasks they are just a bloat). Make sure your Windows installation CD isn't already "slipstreamed" with a service pack.
* Don't install multiple languages (i.e. no multiple keyboard layouts) as it takes up precious resources... just stick with U.S. layout.
* DON'T upgrade from another version of windows. Lots of stuff will be left hanging over and the performance will suffer
* Keep (or choose) the (very fast for old computers) FAT file system during installation as opposed to the heavier and more secure NTFS filesystem
Removed cursor shadow
I know... maybe not the biggest resource saver (especially because the graphics card probablky handles this one.
Disable display effects incl color icons
You can run with 16bit color on the desktop (if that is what you graphics card supports best natively. Be aware though that some computers can run with higher color depth but the copmuter processor/CPU (as opposed to the graphics CPU) may have to do more... but usually 16bit is fine.
Then you disbale high-color icons, you disable fading effects, smooth fonts and "show window contents" when dragging - in other words, disable anything fancy
removed sound theme and sound card
Playing sound takes CPU resources and getting sound files takes memory.. disable sound effects, and even disable the sound card... When you run on 32MB there are sacrifices that have to be made... I use my 32MB subnotebook for non-sound things so disabling sound card makes sense because the drivers take up resources.
Disabled (by setting them to "manual" (in case windows needs them)) unneeded services
This is probably the single-most important step after the installation. Windows loads lots of services you might not need and they tak
I would really like to see the basis for the '95% compatible with Windows XP' statement.
Half the stuff I have will run on XP but not Windows 2000. That's the whole reason I got the XP "pay-for upgrade" in the first place.
And they said zombies weren't real!
...No
Being funny is my sig nature.
I would have thought the requirments of many new computer games are driving PC sales. I used to use windows 95 on an 11yr old thinkpad for college work until last year. Its hardly news that Windows 2000 is good for ordinary everyday mundane tasks. I dont think many people buy retail versions on windows anyway. So it may well be that people use 2k on old machines because its good for what they want to do.
Ye, you can use older machines to run Windows 2000. You can tweak the hell out of services and effects and it'll run smooth as butter.
Would I follow this guy's advice? Hell no. He doesn't want to patch or update anything. His setup would be a good for a person who never needed internet access.
It's like saying "Hay guyz, Redhat 4 runs on old systems great if you don't patch to the latest version!@!!"
It's been said that "Running Windows on a Pentium is like having a brand new Porsche but only be able to drive backwards with the handbrake on." This guy has taken it a step further, comparable to having a '94 Camry which is missing its handbrake lever and can't even go into reverse.
Now there's a stretch.
There will always be a certain percentage of the population that doesn't need anything newer than what was available in 1999. The "older hardware" in the article was relatively current at the time Win2K was introduced. The problem is that our needs have changed. Back then, the average image may have been 100K or so, maybe 500K. Now, the "same" picture requires 10M. Processors need to work with a lot more bits and the older hardware, though it works fine for email and text processing, are close to useless with bigger files.
It is true that the average user (grandma and co.) only know that 1. XP is newest, therefore best (thanks to microsoft media hype) 2. Their current pc won't run XP. For most, win2k doesn't even factor in... plus low low closeout prices at the corner electronics store means the microsoft planned obsolescence machine is running smoothly year after year.
my formerly computerphobic daughter had to go mobile and on a shoestring budget...she got an ancient Toshiba 8500 series laptop. By adding a bit of memory, and downloading a BIOS patch from Toshiba, she got it to run win2k. 6 months later, its still a happy laptop. We will have to upgrade from win2k someday...
...to Linux.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
"DONT install an extra service pack (they can offer perfromance and reliability improvements on faster computers but on old computers with few tasks they are just a bloat). Make sure your Windows installation CD isn't already 'slipstreamed' with a service pack."
and
"How to use the computer on a daily basis...Don't apply O/S patches for security stability or other things."
This is advice from an idiot for other idiots. I'm sure the worms and other malware you invite onto this system will make great use of the "more than 10 MB RAM left for your applications."
Perhaps if there were greater incentives for new computers besides "your computer only has n of x, now you can get n+1 for x!" Im not buying a new plasma TV until my 8 year old projection tv kicks the bucket, likewise if i can make due with old PC tech, why should i shell out more of my money?
Lets be thankful M$ didn't impose arbitrary blocks against what the FA quotes as 'specs it was never even meant to run on' with clippy saying "your computer is too slow, would you like directions to best buy to get a better computer?"
maybe i'll upgrade when that VR technology i heard about in the 80's gets here
Doesnt seem to matter. People are buying the latest OS in droves, mostly because its included with new PC. Same thing will happen when longhorn comes out. People said the same thing when XP first came out "tons of ppl have win9x surely no one will upgrade to XP right?" Turns out most ppl did.
The answer is: No, my empty purse seriously impedes PC sales.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
...with a little technical TLC every now-and-then. Like the Times article about how people buy new PCs because of spyware, most consumers cannot figure out the insanity of Windows. They certainly can't figure out that their new computer does almost nothing more for them then their old computer -- the only difference is that the old one "stopped working."
I don't think it's necessarily that Win2k can operate fine on decade old hardware, I think it's that the hardware is fit to perform to the degree that Win2k will have it perform. New software demands better hardware and today's capabilitys aren't going to work for 10 year old hardware.
Until my laptop purchased in 2003, I was running Win98 on a crappy computer from 2000. In 2000, that computer was probably midlevel. It was pretty much what we could afford. It wasn't bad, but times changed and it just couldn't keep up anymore with the constraints of new software. If you start upgrading it to keep up with new technology then you're no longer running old hardware so the point is moot.
Win2k is great for those who prefer it over XP cause XP has its fair share of problems but most software companies are phasing out their software for 2000 and developing it specifically for XP.
Just as long as no one decides to bring back WinME, I'm fine.
Win2k is my favorite Windows. It runs everything that XP does (don't know where the OP got 95% from), doesn't have the activation bullshit, and is just more stable and less resource hungry than XP.
:)
That being said, I've come across multiple new or newer hardwares that don't support Win2k properly.
Examples:
I bought a Dell 4550 years ago, perhaps circa 2002 or 2003. It would not run Win2k out of the box - audio hardware was unsupported, and drives only ran in DMA mode under XP. Same with Linux. Much complaining to Dell, and a three month wait resulted in replacement audio hardware and a new BIOS that did the trick.
No Nvidia based motherboards allow all features to run with Win2k. I've tried two, and neither allows bootable RAID or any other RAID functionality - the drivers are there, but they just don't work.
MS has tentacles into everything, and you WILL upgrade eventually. I guess I'll move on to XP once Longhorn is truly threatening
jh
Windows 2000 is amazing-- blazing fast and solid as a rock. I tried XP for a couple months and quickly switched back to 2000. Unfortunately, as Microsoft slowly discontinues updates, patches, and support for Windows 2000, you will eventually have to migrate to XP, 2k3, or Longhorn.
I installed Windows Server 2003 a year or two ago and haven't looked back. It has all of the stability and speed of 2000, except with the improved compatibility and features of XP. Subjectively, I can tell you that it doesn't "deteriorate" like XP does. (Your mileage may vary.) And did I mention it was blazing fast on my dated hardware?
It uses a newer kernel than XP, for the record. One of the major differences I've noticed is that windows redraw more smoothly with less flickering, especially in Explorer. It includes XP's WiFi connectivity features, too.
There's an excellent site dedicated to using Server 2003 as a workstation, including instructions on how to disable unnecessary services and processes.
I'm curious how XP performs relative to 2k if you turn off all the extra crud 2k doesn't have, has anyone tried this?
Oh man that's it. I'm deleting the bookmark toolbar link to /.
It just doesn't get more boring that it's been the last couple of months, and this article is the most stupid shit I have read since the State of the Union speech from your mentally challenged president "Dubya". This website sucks even more than Private Pile.
Too bad, it used to be good at some point in the past. Or maybe I've just gotten older and don't enjoy bullshit as much anymore.
So long as what the computer vendors and hardware manufacturers produce are things people can use and not just buy for the frills of it you'll have sales.
;-)
Like yeah, I *could* do my development on a 25Mhz 386 with 16M of ram...
However, I also like 19 second build times, the ability to run more indepth simulations for testing, etc...
So yes, there are needs for things like dual core multiple Ghz processors even if they seem excessive for "word processing".
Unfortunately, the amount of people on earth who truly can benefit from [say] a dual core AMD64 probably can't fill a baseball stadium.
The vast majority of home users are not developers and could easily get away with much smaller computers had their software they chose to run been so crippled.
But what do I care? All these yuppy idiots buying AMD64s to run winxp32 drive the cost down for me. So it's win win
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
For anecdotal evidence, Windows 2000 is the most modern OS that runs on my old 1998 Dell Inspiron 3500 with 100% functionality. All linux distros choke on the NeoMagic sound card, 2 out of 3 choke on the NeoMagic video card. I hate to give it up because it still works.. even the battery still holds a couple hour charge.
Speak truth to power.
Runs Debian Linux. Half the computers in there are Celeron 400mhz boxes, and the rest are P4 2.4ghz. Interestingly enough the performance difference is not noticable.
Now move to the Windows XP lab. There's a bunch of 400mhz Celeron boxes (same brand, etc) with XP, and some 2.4Ghz boxes with XP. The 2.4Ghz boxes boot up about 4-5 times faster, and take 2 seconds, instead of 15 seconds, to load Firefox. Etc.
The Celerons in the Linux lab load Firefox faster than the 2.4Ghz P4s in the XP lab. A tribute to the bloatedness of XP, I guess.
changes services to "manual". boot the machine, find out which services are needed. then change the relevant ones to "automatic". strip out unneeded components with XPlite, or do it manually. switch the shell from Explorer to something slimmer. then use lightweight apps from tinyapps.org. not exactly a modern box, but it would work.
I'd just say:
Nlite, nuff said.
But then you wouldn't see how this measures up to the article in question. So I'll say it like this:
Windows XP SP2 running on a Pentium 166 mhz with 32 meg RAM, only possible with Nlite.
I ran this along with Xampp to provide myself with a nice little development box that could still use Firefox/Thunderbird so roommates could read the web, play web games, and check their email.
I didn't hear any complaining except during playback of certain XviD and DivX files in BSplayer.
I'm not selling PCs.
Nick
It's not so much the OS version and PC speed, but whether it does what you need it to do FOR YOU....in a relatively painless manner. If you have an 8 year old machine running win2k, but your CAD program is slow, that would most likely push you to move to new hardware.
Large organizations/companies/schools have other concerns with warranties and support and the like, it usually cheaper to stay close to current.....
But in general if it works currently, most don't jump on buying new, and when they do its usually that they need more drive space, or a sale or deal that was just too good to pass up.
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
That's virgin Windows 2000 with no service patches (or apps for that matter). The 64 Mb is critical. I discovered all of this back when Windows 2000 was in beta (1998), and we installed it on some machines that were running NT 4.0.
FYI. Windows 2000 development at M$ was done on Pentium/Pentium II class hardware, with a big machine sporting 128 MB memory. Intel only started shipping Pentium III's around its release.
M$ changed things with SP2, and forced the memory requirement up to 128 Mb.
"Microsoft is encouraging people to throw away computers, huh? [stroking chin] Interesting... but how does this relate to their involvement in the JFK assassination? More research is needed..."
The Warren Commission had to get rid of many megabytes of data related to the investigation of the assassination for fear that future researchers using advanced artificial intelligence algorythms (cool, two root Arabic words in the same English sentence) would uncover the grand conspiracy.
They turned to a 'boy genius' 9-year-old computer whiz living in a middle-class suburb in Seattle. No one would believe that a boy would be able to accomplish this task, and so the deed went completely unnoticed. Twenty years later, huge government contracts went secretly to the now-grown-up whiz's little company (along with the services of the government's most advanvanced programmer's who were able to the boy's hopeless operating system into near working condition).
So there!
I bought a IntelliMouse Explorer for Bluetooth, ironically to use with a Mac.
It does work on Mac OS X.
When I tried to use it at work I found out the Bluetooth USB dongle doesn't work on Win2K Professional.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Wow, this story was on Digg first. I never thought it would happen, it's bizarro world.
runs Office 2000 suite just fine, scanning/printing/fax, and turbotax. Still has regular security patches from microsoft. amazing how many commercial apps run on 95/98/nt
What a pile of misleading crap! I have a 8 month old PC and it's registry has grown out of hand, I can hardly use it when the virus scanner runs (every time it feels like it)among SMS, CSRSS, LSASS, SVCHOST, NBPClientSvcush, WebScanX and all the other CRAP that is REQUIRED for running such a USELESS OS!!!!
I find it odd that an IT department would willingly purchase a "sizable chunk" of OS licenses for an OS that hasn't been available for license as a retail product for 15.5 months.(http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle /default.mspx)
While it's only been 3.5 months since system builders could license it it is still, by Microsoft's documentation, an unlicensable product at this point in time.
Having used 98, NT4.x, 2K, and XP at work (digital content creation) and at home since about '97 I can say that I've not noticed any appreciable performance hit in XP compared to the previous versions. Certainly not enough to warrant buying a product that lost mainstream support six weeks ago. (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh ;%5Bln%5D;LifeWin)
I'm typing this on a box quite happily running NT 4.0 Server SP5, it's fast enough for anything I want to do.
windows XP on a 20 megahertz Pentium with 32 megabytes of RAM. http://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm
A six year old OS performing on hardware from 2 years before its release is not that impressive.
Just because it runs doesn't mean it runs well.
I have installed Win2000 on an old Compaq laptop (333 MHz) that used to run Win98. The performance hit I took was ridiculous. I actually wish I had Win98 back on it, or better yet, maybe I will install Linux.
The author of this article explicitly recommends *not* installing critical Windows 2000 security updates or Service Packs at all. Somehow, he claims, this will improve speed while reducing bloat.
While that could be (questionably) true, the viruses he's likely to pick up after about 15 minutes on the Internet will likely decrease his laptop's speed by a far more significant amount...
Is it even responsible for Slashdot to post such an unprofessional article?
No. The majority don't really care or know enough to care about system specs and their OS.
They just buy the next greatest thing since slice bread that Dell, the TV ads or anybody else is peddling. Most of the time you dont even get a choice for an OS (I said most, I know there are places you can choose), its either Windows home edition or professional.
M$ it's whats for diner!!!!!
does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?
Not if besides Win2k you also want to run Doom 3, WoW, etc.
The author of that howto claims that you should:
NOT install any service packs or patches
NOT use NTFS
NOT use a sound card
NOT use removable storage (CD, USB, etc)
NOT use windows networking
NOT use a parallel printer
NOT install many applications
NOT have more than 1 application open at a time
NOT work with big (1MB+) files
Well WTF good is that computer then? The title of the article is "Win2000 Still Performs on 8-year-old Hardware". How is this performance?
From a personal computing standpoint, that drives sales because while people can use newer programs on older hardware, they tend to run slower. From a business prospective, they loss in productivity from slow equiptment is less than the cost of an upgrade. That is why I type this on an Intel Pentium II. As a journalist, I write my articles with Word 97 and brows the Internet with IE 6, suprisingly. (Firefox doesn't work with our current network configueration, but we're working on that ... I hope.)
Lag is an issue from time to time. To open a .pdf takes almost a minute, giving me time for a trip to the water cooler. And one of my co-workers, almost daily, slaps his machine, talking about "hot lead" as an IT solution.
Now if we were to switch to Linux and get newer, cheap systems, it might not cost that much. Hmmm ... I think I have figured out a project for this week. Something more exciting than the motercycle v.s. bear MVA.
It preforms just as well as 2k does on my Pentium 2, with 128 megs of ram. Used for a wireless wardriving machine in my trunk.
I need like maybe 25 for some old hardware in my basement.
Love and Peace to all!
++
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
what's so amazing about that? it's like saying windows95 still supports 12 year old hardware.
I just bought a vintage fountain pen this weekend at a pen show. I guess this is bad news for the pen industry.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
The broad question is, does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?
Isn't that a good thing, though? If we can still use all the applications and data we need to without constantly upgrading, it seems like an excellent thing all round. Fewer perfectly good machines scrapped just because M$'s latest bloatware can't run on them, less of a drain on mineral resources (eg tantalum) for the production of new computers, reduced cost for companies who find they don't actually have to upgrade all their machines every few years.
The only people I see who don't benefit are the PC makers, and frankly with all the DRM crap and beta-quality chips[0] they keep trying to foist on us who can feel sorry for them?
[0] F00F, recent Athlon memory bug thing as a couple of examples...
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
the "turbo" button activates the overclocking ;-)
I've run 2k on a Toshiba Satelltie 2100cdt (K6-2 @ 400MHz, 64MB RAM), as well as a Pentium @ 100MHz 32MB.
From TFA:
"DONT install an extra service pack (they can offer perfromance and reliability improvements on faster computers but on old computers with few tasks they are just a bloat). Make sure your Windows installation CD isn't already "slipstreamed" with a service pack."
This is crap if you want to do anything while connected. If not connected, I'd recommend it.
On the Satellite 2100cdt with service packs and hotfixes, it ran fine as long as I did have too many large apps open at the same time. On the 100MHz 32MB system, I left the service packs off. (It was my mp3 > stereo player, not connected to the internet).
The article goes through optimization tips. Most of these I did after I installed, they're pretty obvious tips even to me. Common sense is a wonderful thing.
Side note: The laptop is now running Ubuntu Hoary. Aside from full installs of Knoppix (really debian at that point), it's my first _real_ foray into the Linux world. Ubuntu runs slowly on that laptop, but it's useful for learning and man I love that OS.
I've worked with a few other distros...RH/Fedora and SuSE. Maybe it's because I'm pretty new to the Linux world but I seem to like everything about Ubuntu, even the installer! (I mean, do I really need cute graphics on an installer? I think not.)
Specs (7-8 years old):
Tweaked Windows 2000&SP4&Upto date on hotfixes
PII 233mhz
128mb 66mhz SDRAM
30 GB HDD
17" TFT monitor
Boot time:
20-25 seconds (but I leave it on for days at a time)
Software I used daily, most of which is running right now which I think is noteable:
* Office 2003 (It's faster than Office XP)
* K-Meleon (Mozilla based browser but native win32, not XUL or extensions)
* Opera 8 (default browser)
* Abiword (Use this alot)
* Open Office (Use this slightly less)
* Miranda IM (instead of MSN/Windows Messenger)
* Adobe Photoshop CS (I edit 5MP photos all the time, but startup is a bitch)
* P2P - Shareaza, Piolet, KCEasy or giftWin32
* WinAMP 5
* Borland Delphi 7
* Irfanview (lightweight image viewer)
* Nvu (Mozilla based wysiwyg webpage editor)
* Notepad2 for text files
Things I can't do, that I wish I could:
* Watch anything over VCD resolution MPEG-4 (although I could get a hardware decoder like the X-card)
* Encode movies inside 12 hours
* Watch DVD's (no hardware MPEG-2 decoder but hey I have a 32" TV or another PC for that)
* mIRC
Noteable facts:
* Windows out of the box is slow and insecure
* Choosing good lightweight software is just as important than having endless CPU cycles
* Out of the box my AMD64 3000+, 512mb machine (Came with XP Home) seemed slower and less responsive.
In this case, we have someone who says you can run Windows on old hardware. Great! Maybe I can go and buy one of those $25 yard sale specials and quite dreaming of 64-bit Photoshop, whenever Adobe releases it. But, unlike a lot of Slashdotters, figure I better go a RTFA. Good thing I did:
Useability
This really about covers it:
> Only have 1 application open at a time if possible
It is true that the less you ask Windows to do, the better it does it. However, since the middle 1990's, this is not a real-world suggestion. For example: you have a spreadsheet that you want to get parts of to include in a report being composed in Microsoft Word. Are you to shut down Excel and start up Word, and paste part of it in, lather, rinse, repeat until done?
But wait! There's more...
> You can run with 16bit color on the desktop
Okay, forget the web and pictures.
> disable sound effects, and even disable the sound card
Not so bad, considering you won't be able to run any multimedia.
> Remove LPT/printer port
No ZIP drive, and printing over a network only
> Use hibernation feature
Over half of the computers I ever tried to use it with did a horrible job of it. Better to just leave the thing on and locked.
Security
>DONT install an extra service pack
>Don't apply O/S patches for security stability or other things.
Yes, a good idea. Security is somewhat inconsequential in this day and age. If you are going to do that, do not link up to the internet!
So: all in all, you have a computer that you can barely use and if you have any sense at all, you do not connect to the internet. While it may be a good solution for some, in the real world, the only time you would ever use this is if you were on a desert island and simply couldn't get anything else.
This is one big reason why I standardized my company on it. It's the best OS I've seen when you want something that "just works" with all kinds of hardware and software. We won't be "upgrading" until we have a very solid business reason to do so. Right now, I don't see any reason to go to Longhorn whenever it comes out, either. So W2K may be the first desktop OS with longevity similar to that of the old Unix machines and the greenscreens before that.
I don't respond to AC's.
Actually, this article isn't praising anything. I mean, duh, an old>/b> OS runs well on old hardware! Needless to say, the guy had to disable things like "file system security" to make it perform....i don't see how this is praising anything.
Are you kidding me? Of course Windows 2000 runs on 8 year old hardware, it's a 5yo OS. What good would it have been back in 2000 if it didn't run on hardware that was three years old back then? What's the big secret that it still runs today?
What is humor if not pain tempered by time?
I ran Windows 2000 on a 486 and once you got 64 megs of ram (maxed out the system), it ran better then Windows 98 did at the time.
Reserved Word.
With that said, I tried installing Win2K a few years back on my dual P II 450 with 768 Megs of RAM. It was on a really sweet Tyan board from 1997. It installed alright, but it ran like a slug through molasses on a cold January night. The boot alone took 10-15 minutes. This system had SCSI2 drives as well, so there really were no bottle necks. No weird interrupt problems to speak of, nothing odd. So then I installed RedHat 9 and did something you can never do with Windows. I recompiled the kernel for SMP and tweaked it with the realtime patches. I also customized the hell out of it by just installing the very minimum of RedHat, stripping what I didn't want and installing everything from source. The end result? A super secure, super efficient system that performs as well as a P4 running at 1 Ghz. It's been running like this going on three years now. Uptimes have been incredible compared to any desktop PC I've ever used before. It plays the role of internal DNS, NTP, Web, Mail and File servers. It's also the main application server for the house with centralized everything. The rest of my systems just act as thin clients that can easily attach to an IN PROGRESS desktop session using VNC. I never log out of my VNC desktop anymore, I just lock the screen. Same for my wife and two friends who use the system via OpenVPN over the internet.
The point to all this? I do things that you CAN'T do with Windows and this box is eight years old but feels like it's only 2 years old. Machines really should last closer to 10-15 years before having to buy a new one. The idea of the disposable machine is moronic.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I do wonder how much of this memory burden is due to modern applications. My Firefox is using up 60MB at the moment, and I'm sure I used to use a web browser in the days when computers were endowed with rather less memory. I think our expectations of performance have gone up too. I remember many happy (well maybe not happy) minutes spent each time I waited for Corel Draw to re-plot the screen. We'd never tolerate an application that behaved in that way now.
Of course it slows sales. I knew people that were still using DOS/Win 3.x applications into the late 90s. Why? Because they wanted word processing, to query a remote database, and do a few other simple tasks. Their old DOS/Win box did that for them.
Allowing sales growth and obsolescence to drive the industry is irresponsable in many ways: environmentally, ethicly, economicly (for the customers anyway). Plus, it's just wrong.
8 years == 1997.
Yawn.
Or half your life if you're 16.
Maybe a big deal.
Does it run on my 80286 "Leading Edge" clone? That would be impressive.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
There is a Asus P/E-P55T2P4D which is a dual Pentium I-mainboard which was presented in March of 1994.
It is possible to install Win2K on this computer, the computer detects both CPUs and runs, hmmm, smooth until you do something.
Moving the mouse increases CPU load on both CPUs to 30 per cent.
Well, it is a nice thing to play. The CPU has a small active fan but when one broke, it ran for some month. I accidentially unlocked the passive fan which lost physical contact to the CPU for some hours but it did not crash nor seems to be any damage there.
The only issue was that the BIOS battery is not that fit anymore.
I think you might be kidding yourself. Even with the candy turned off XP would run like poo down your leg on a 486. Slow and awkwardly. Could you imagine waiting for Norton and MS Office to start up on a 486? And if your referring to simply running a stock install only, then what good is saying XP runs fine on old hardware when as soon as you launch one app it grinds to a halt? I think launching WMP alone would melt the cpu of a 486 ;)
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
In 1999 I bought a top of the line "Bad-MaMaJama" system with all the hot specs. Loaded it up with all the top of the line development software of the era from 3D Studio Max R3 ($3,500 back then) to Visual Studio.
;-)
Then in 2000 I moved out of the development world into the realm of management, sales, etc. So My old Work horse is a dinosaur now, and I still do some development on the side for fun. But seriously why do I need to upgrade from PhotoShop 7 to PhotoShop CS? They both push pixels with equal ease. The Tools for the casual user are not so much better today than they were 6 years ago to force an upgrade (how much has the hammer evolved in 6 years?).
All facts considered my 6 year old system is blazingly fast so long as I run Circa 1999 Software.... that is until I load up Office 2003, or even (gasp) Firefox. It amazes me that a Circa 2005 Browser like Firefox can bring my system to it's knees whereas a Crica 1999 Enterprise aplication like 3D Studio Max rips along without breaking a sweat. Oh well, time to upgrade so I can keep up with the browser wars....oh sorry, that was such a 1999 statement to make
From the blurb: does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?
Actually, a lot of the PC industry was banking on the idea of new PCs being sold in a cycle much like cars are sold. What they didn't count in was the Joe Sixpacks out there who think that old hardware should last forever and refuse to invest in new equipment unless the old equipment fails and fails miserably. I'm sure we all know the story:
Joe Sixpack will cry and complain that his p2-350 runs like a slug compared to someone elses p4-3.2 and will not except the fact that it's time to upgrade. So what does he do? He corners you at your local bar and weeps about how maybe you can do something to make his system run a bit faster. You try to tell him it's a lost cause and it's time to move on but all the while he tells you he can't "afford" to invest a whopping 800USD in a new PC while you sit there and watch him put twenties into a video poker machine like they were dimes. This is the same guy who owns the 50K dollar SUV parked out front, BTW.
Joe doesn't have a clear and honest perspective on the life cycle of a PC and the local compugeeks suffer because these guys just will not leave them alone about it...
Please suppress these types of articles, it only keeps Joe's hopes alive that his Atari 2600 can be upgraded to a PS2.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I have (on a ppro 200 with 128 meg).
:)
It runs 'ok'. You just need to disable the theme service, and whatever else you do not need. It was just as usable as the nt4 that came with it originaly. It also looked about the same as the 'extra' GUI stuff was gone.
Only took about 2 hours to install though
I run OrCAD schematic capture and PCB layout DOS version 2.01 on a 1GigaHertz AMD Duron. This is the same program that I learned electronic design CAD on in 1990.
It is a dream combination. I have all the macro keys set-up right. The screen and program can finally keep up with my input. The PCB design compiles as fast as I can move from the mouse to the keyboard (I used to take a coffee break at this point when running OrCAD on a 286).
The screen image is a very cool, beautiful, and efficient black backgrounded and colored foreground of traces and symbols.
I have used the later OrCAD versions of these programs in various jobs. But they suck. They're ugly and have a terrible user-interface.
DOS electronic CAD has finally gotten hardware worthy of the program.
Did I mention that I can also listen to WinAmp music, download files, and convert DVDs to DivX in the background while still doing OrCAD development work at full speed?
if you buy xp licenses, you are entitled to request media for and legally install 2000 in its stead. since they cost about the same, i don't see the need to specifically buy windows 2000.
am I supposed to be impressed that it insalls on a machine that was only 3 years old when win2000 came out.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
with old Windows hardware!
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
I came across some 486DX-33s a few years ago (around 1998-1999 or so) and wanted to set them up so my mom, sister and nieces could play network / internet scrabble on them (scrabble was BIG in my house). I tried installed Win2k on them but the install complained about the processor being too slow (I think it said it wanted 66 or 75mhz). I was able to install from another machine, P166 i thank, and swap the harddrives back to the 486s and it booted. It wasn't usable, but it "ran". I think I eventually switched them over to P90s I picked up for $10 each or so.
Stupid Cheap Guitars
Perfect platform for stress testing multi-user apps because the platform sucks. If it works well there, it'll work anywhere (that supports Win32 code, that is).
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
Does the 30 year old washing machine down the hall still wash clothes?
Of course it does. As a consumer, I want something that works. Unless I own stock or work for someone like Dell, I couldn't give a crap about new computer sales.
Still runs on my old 386, so should i be suprised that Win2k still runs on circa 1998 machines?
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
A P233 is old hardware. I just (last week) disposed of a P200 in constant use since 1997. The thing never broke down over 8 years, but I couldn't put more than 64MB of RAM in it, so it wasn't running reasonably anymore. That is, the OS with minimal services and a firewall was acceptable so long as no time-sensitive applications were running. When I dismantled it, it was running Win2k as an Internet gateway, but it originally came with Win95.
Did someone expect that 2000 would somehow perform different now than it did 5 years ago on what was 3 year old hardware then? Yes, I realize the real point was that it can run on old hardware AND compete with XP, but the article title is just moronic.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
The support issues are one thing, but go install XP on something with 32 MB of RAM if you want to talk speed. If you've noticed no difference between versions, it's probably because you haven't run 98 and XP on the same machine. See you in a week after it boots. Maybe. Even 128 is slow as hell, which 2K works fine with.
http://www.ntcompatible.com/Win2k_command_line_opt ions_to_disable_memory_check_t23403.html
Yeah. I have taken an old PII 300, popped in 384 Megs of ram I had sitting around... changed all windows settings to "performance" and it runs better than my Girlfriend's Athlon xp 1800 with 512 DDR. Granted.. a lot of that might have to do with the fact that I know how to keep my system free of kazaa/spyware... but still! That's 1/3rd the power, and runs just as good.
Submitter forgot the word "Poorly" in the headline. : )
I assert that my comment is only my opinion, not that of any employer, past, present or future.
XP cannot run on a 486 because XP requires the CPUID instruction, only available on Pentiums.
(Okay, it is available on *SOME* 486s... I think the 486 DX4/100 has it. But your garden-variety 486/66 will not have that x86 opcode implemented, so XP won't run.)
Quite well I might add. I saw it with my own eyes in 2004, on a production machine.
......
Seriously, most OSes can be squeezed way down if you reduce functionality. Don't need printing, save ram. Don't need secure file system, save ram. Don't need
I bet XP can be similarly pared down, probably not quite to 32MB w/ 10MB for apps though, at least not on any system I'd want to put on a network.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
No, you most likely bought Windows XP licenses and applied your downgrade rights.
Microsoft wins again.
The writer of this article is a little strange if he considers a P233 old hardware.
Er, no. You are a little strange if you don't consider a P233 to be old hardware.
Think about it. Since then, we've got rid of the old-style keyboard plug and serial mice in favour of PS/2, and then got rid of PS/2 in favour of USB. We've gone from 233MHz as normal to 2333MHz as normal - CPUs are ten times faster. We've gone from 10GB hard disks to 100GB hard disks. We've gone from 32MB or 64MB RAM as standard to a 1GB RAM as standard.
By any reasonable measure, a P233 is old. Sure, you might argue that it's modern in that it uses transistors instead of vacuum pumps, but I don't think a vacuum pump computer is going to run any form of Windows well, do you?
Back when Windows 2000 came out (1999, kids) I was using a P233 as my primary machine.
In 1999, I was using a Celeron 400 (still do, as a file server). Even back then, that was a budget CPU I bought as a student.
And Windows 2000 was released in the year 2000, believe it or not. Did you think the "2000" was just some arbitrary number Microsoft stuck on the end?
Who has the time to wait for a 10 year old system to boot. I surly don't have 15 mins to waist everytime my 10 year old system BSOD.
Cheaper hardware and more demanding software has forced individuals to upgrade not better software.
How do you know what poo running down your leg feels like?
You didn't used to have to worry about this. We used to have a situation where application requirements were generally higher than those of mainstream computers and the application designers were constantly fighting to keep their applications lean enough to be useful. The fact is there has been an emphasis on speed in software because of hardware limitations for a long time:
1) We use languages like C/C++ primarily for speed. Why aren't we using the high level languages for our applications thus making the scripting/macro language infinitely powerful since it can reprogram any level including the engine itself (i.e. more like the Lisp philosophy of application design).
2) Virtually every mainstream kernel is high speed high performance. Why aren't people getting the huge advantages in terms of: reliability, feature control, configurability, etc... of micro-kernels except for fear of the 20-30% speed hit? Imagine scripting languages being able to take raw kernel style messages.
3) Most OS features are fairly lightweight. We don't use technologies that were common in minis and mainframes in the 1970s (machines much slower than today's machines) for fear of bloat. For example there is no good reason other than speed to not be using a database filesystem which would give us: automatic versioning, better multitasking, better change control... except for fears of speed loss (lets say requiring double the current hard drive speeds plus a maybe an extra hundred megs or ram.
4) Our applications don't use complex algorithms. Why aren't we using neural nets to reprogram the menus and make the application slowly customize itself to your way or working? Why isn't the help system using a real language AI?
Applications on the desktop level have been stagnant now for almost a decade. The only real big changes have been
a) heavy networking based apps
b) multimedia
Without competition though I can't see Microsoft really advancing the state of the art so I guess we all have to root for apple and open source.
Gee, that's brilliant...
Let's see it boot in ten seconds WITHOUT hibernation.
Jesus, some people think everybody but them is an idiot that can't read or doesn't know as much as they do.
Ten MB of RAM to run apps in.
Wow. I'm so thrilled. My text editor might actually work. Certainly Notepad will.
This guy has WAY too much time on his hands. Obviously a sixteen-year-old
Actually I appreciate knowing the tweaks to help Windows 2000 run on old hardware. It's knowledge that might come in handy when working on some client's old POS - and I get a lot of those idiots trying to make a Libretto their main desktop machines. I had one guy try to install Comcast cable on one - Comcast won't even install with less than 64MB.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
As for Windows 2000, yeah, thats great. I suppose you can get it to run on something old, but, why? What the author is suggesting is dumb. Why not just go and get a board and chip for $150, and build something, THEN put Windows 2000 on it. I don't see how running Windows on something like that will be useful. For a server, yeah. But I'd go with Linux or FreeBSD.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Thanks for the clarification.
For everybody who runs Windows 2000 on old machines, as a recent
So I'd say Windows, old or new, is definitely contributing to buying new PCs.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I love it when two
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I recently tried to get a few Linux distros running on an old Celeron 333 with about 128MB of ram. Not a single distro was usable for basic web browsing, email and word processing (open office, abi word etc). Its a fucking joke that unless you wind back to a crappy old version of KDE its absolutely not usable on anything less than 3 year old machine. Stuck Windows 2000 on it eventually and thats what works. No linux distro is ready for the desktop, i can't find any that work on old hardware, and no I do not call using Windows 3.1 grade software 'working' on old hardware. I expect a modern browser and word processor, I expect a window manager that more than 3 other people use. Ok I guess this is a fault with KDE not Linux (well most distros that fit on a CD use KDE) KDE sucks, it sucks majorly, its slow, its resource hungry and they waste time on 'skinability' when they haven't finished the basics.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I have win 2000 installed on my Compaq Proliant 850R. This unit is a Dual Pentuim Pro 200 MHz machine, with 512MB of RAM and Win2K performs silky smooth even WITH service packs installed. Witha fast SCSI hard drive, this computer is used as my webserver and works very well. Much love to Win2K Probably my favorite M$ OS.
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
Wow. The instant I made fun of somebody for modding my joke "Interesting," my original post got modded down into oblivion. I guess that'll teach me to complain.
To me it seemed the whole period from about 1998 to 2004 was a bit different in that things slowed down quite a bit as far as OSes pushing new motherboard/CPU sales compared to the early/mid 1990s. Unless you're a gamer there really hasn't been a need to upgrade. I'm still running a PIII 500 and I frankly haven't felt a need to upgrade as I mostly use it for email, surfing the web, and watching TV (TV tuner).
I think the main cause for the slowdown was that you only need so much hardware to run a word processor or Outlook (which is what the the average joe uses a computer for), that and the first year or two of P4s were very lackluster compared to the last generation PIIIs.
Recently I have noticed modern websites taxing my PC much more than they use to, and for the average joe I think the spyware/malware that they almost inevitably have on their computers saps 10%-30% of their computing performance. Put that together with the steep increase in system requirements that you see on upcoming software and it seems there is a renewed push for new hardware by modern software.
Where the heck is that?
My buddy and i got Windows 2000 Server to run reliably on a P150 with 128MB ram. Win2k does well on old hardware indeed. People still think they NEED to upgrade though, and people switch computers cause the old one gets screwed up with spyware/etc even though the hardware's fine, so they will buy anyway.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
In 2020, Windows 2000 will still perform on 23 year old hardware.
A couple of good points in the article, but he says you shouldn't install a service pack as it just "adds bloat". Now, I don't know about you, but I'd never run W2k (or WXP for that matter) without the latest service pack (and for w2k the rollup pack that just was published recently).
And, Windows 2000 on "8 year old hardware" doesn't sound that impressive - after all Windows 2000 is almost as old...
Additionally, I can easily beat that, Windows XP on 9-year old hardware! (though it's no longer my pc, I had "only" Windows 2000 installed on it)
(ok I admit 9 year old is cheated a bit. CPU is newer, a K6-III 400, and ram has been upgraded 6 years ago or so to 128MB from the initial 32MB. But motherboard (asus t2p4) and most other components (3.2GB hd, 2MB matrox mystique graphic card, sound card etc. are all 1996).)
The idea of the viability of older machines infringing on PC sales has a counter part:y .html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1121714413-DRsR6D+N9V6Va2Tk Eulp+Q
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/technology/17sp
You should try this thing called 'Google'...
Did you think the "(1999, kids)" was just some arbitrary text the gp stuck in the sentence?
Norton is able to make every computer slow.
Win2000 Still Performs - nuff said.
A while back I bought a 800MHz 128MB tiny japanese laptop running WinXP and it is the slowest computer I have owned since my 33Mhz 8MB running Win3.1.
I did not have to the choice to get Win2k. I wish I did, because WinXP is SLOOOOOOOW on a less than uber computer. WinXP on my desktop is a perfectly acceptable speed though... 'cept the file manager which has some unreasonable delay.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Win2000 is what? 5, 6 years of age? So it's compatible with 3 year old computers when it came out? Duh. And I'm sure even older PC like the infamous IBM clones can even run it.
The human race is artificial intelligence created using object orientated programming.
People like that would be far better off loading Fedora 4, or Umbutu or.....
They would have the same functionality, but with no worries about the BSA coming in with a search warrent and battering ram. More importantly, they wouldn't have to worry about 40,000 viruses making the system useless before they even started working on it.
The would also have a modern, supported operating system, and software to do things like word processing without the need to spend more than the current value of the machine on even more buggy software.
I actually did that last week. Got a machine that was being 'dumped' at the computer store on the corner, loaded FC4 onto it and delivered it to a native elder who doesn't have the money to buy a new machine for himself.
I even gave him an old inkjet printer and enough ink to last him a few years of refills. Now he can surf, write memoires, use email and not have to worry about being 'owned' -- and once he gets cheap broadband, I can even do remote support for him.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Man! I wish you had told me. I need a new Linux web server and router. Your P200 is almost twice as fast as the machine I'm currently using.
That really depends on the consistency of the poo doesn't it?
Having your PC run like poo down your leg when you had some bad beer or a curry the night before could be considered a good thing, at least for the PC.
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
So the first thing i look at now is how much memory can I add. 2 GB has been my standard for non-laptops for a while. Most laptops can be had with 512 MB installed, and then drop in another gig later.
Really looking at this is interesting. I have one Compaq portable that has 256MB running XP. It never uses more than 50% of the processor, and already runs hot. I want to drop in another 256, but am told it will just run hotter. Another machine that looks nice, but was engineered to actually take advantage of the otherwise impressive hardware.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The real question is: Do I care if I'm impeding PC sales?
Failing hardware aside, if what I've got now is already locked down, and the hardware performs perfectly under load, and I have room to add software features to my applications as necessary: Do I care if Dell wants to sell me a new multi-processor Xeon blade? Not really.
Expense without some sort of valid justification is wasted money. Put the dollars somewhere else.
If your old hardware is under-powered, and impeding business progress, of course you'll upgrade. But unless I'm under direct pressure from a vendor, I'm not going to waste money feeding the low-cost hardware boom.
However, if my vendor end-of-lifes a product, states it is no longer supported, warranted and spare parts are no longer going to be produced, or become exceedingly expensive - well, I might just get that new box after all.
For some minor applications, that old Windows 2000 server with 256MB of RAM might be just fine as-is, as long as its not a support liability. (No, having a machine that runs d.net or Seti@Home faster in your server room is probably *not* a real business reason for a faster server).
Modern programmers are lazy, they have so much power and memory available they don't bother to optimize there code anymore. It's a sad state of affairs.
Pentium 233MMX
128MB RAM
2MB Video Card
4GB 5400rpm IBM Quantum Fireball
2x USB 1.1 Ports
56k Modem
And it's still running 2000... and till running, period, after I got it in 1997.
~The TwoTailedFox posts again....
Amazingly, the fact that an OS has been around for years doesn't diminish it's ability to perform on hardware that's been around for a little bit longer.
Which is more impressive/important? A new OS that will run on old hardware or new hardware that will run old OSes? You can load ancient Windows OSes on new Intel boxes, but try running System 9 on a modern Mac.
Kevin Fox
That just seems silly. Now throwly RH 9 on there instead would make more sense, or even RH 7 if you're talking 8 years ago. They are starting to merge together for me so I don't remember which versions came out when.
At any rate, I don't see how any of this is really news. Win2k was fast for me even back when it was new, I beta tested it on a 486 100mhz box. It is fairly efficient and light when compared with XP which struggles on anything slower than 300mhz. Of course, XP is dramatically newer so I'm of the mind that is not so bad. In my mind Linux and Windows have led rather parallel lives in this regard.This is actually not true. The only time a Windows XP license is what is considered "downgradable" to a windows 2k license is if you are a software assurance customer.
I'm not saying this will NOT work, it should work, but it will not be legally licensed
I read
As an IT contractor I've been responsible for building images for a few large companies. Most of the new candy is turned of by default and even when XP came out, the classic shell was enforced by policy.
:-)
This is true even in these heady days of P4's.
In a corporate environment pc's are for work, any speed gain is good and guess who drives this?
The end users, every time they blame the computer for a late report, lost email or some other lame excuse.
Most faults lie with the user, this is normally due to lack of, if any training.
This fault lies with management.
Long live Microsoft, long live jobs for life
> Having used 98, NT4.x, 2K, and XP at work (digital content creation) and at home since about '97 I can say that I've not noticed any appreciable performance hit in XP compared to the previous versions
XP is leaps and bounds slower than win2k. I have given XP a try every 6 months since it has been released and still see no reason to run it as it is almost unusable. The UI is no where near as snappy as win2k, the TCP/IP stack is slower, the multiuser kernel implemented winxp is inferior than the win2k kernel, win2k has a smaller memory footprint, less services, etc..
win2k is to winxp like a decent girl you could bring home to your mom is to a dilapidated hooker with STDs - simply not useable.
What performance hit from Win98 -> XP were you expecting? Could you post the quantitative speed analysis numbers, please?
/ evaluation/sysreqs/default.asp
/ sysreqs.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/professional
64MB RAM Minimum, 133MHz CPU Minimum.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/evaluation
128MB RAM Minimum (Though it'll install on 64) and 300MHz CPU.
So if 2000 needs less to function, that leaves more for the rest of our software. And stop with the Weasel Words.
-Pope Peter Porker, S.O.W., K.M.K.R., U.G.O.A., F.S.G.S.D.
I've never tried XP or 2000 on a 486, but I would be willing to bet it'd run fine (NT certainly did). Anyone else tested this?
I believe one of my formers coworkers tried once, for a belligerent customer at my old help desk job. IIRC, The system crapped itself immediately.
Did it on "classic" pentiums plenty of times, too. As you say, with enough memory, it ran well enough...as long as the user wasn't doing any more than Office apps. I wouldn't put XP on anything lower than a 233, myself, but we did one 133, IIRC.
Howdy.
Anyone care to post a more in depth analysis of what this thing does?
Well, technicaly, I don't have to pay for a new copy, only for the paper and ink costs, because I already paid the copyright fee with the old one.
It's the same with that Blues Brother dvd. I already own the vhs. So i paid the copyright fee once already. Alas they didn't want to accept the 1$50 I gave instead of the 15$ they asked.
I even showed them my old vhs, and tried explaining to them how this stuff worked, but the big man in an uniform threw me out before he could understand.
Damn, and the worse is I'm right.... There is a capitalistic conspiracy making me pay many time for the same thing...8)
(it remind me of the guy emptying a few packs on cola into a bucket from the same store. When the security guy came to stop him, he just said "look, they say I gotta open the can to see if I won, and at the same time they say that this game is free and I don't have to buy to participate... So, here is the cola in the bucket, I didn't drink it. But I will take those 3 empty can, they are winner...")
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
It actuall RTMed in December 1999, more or less.
(Yes, Mods, I know I'm duping myself.)
Actually, we bought Windows 2000 OEM copies with the parts for the new systems we needed. One copy per stick of RAM. Cost was the same as the last time upgrade licenses were available.
-Pope Peter Porker, S.O.W., K.M.K.R., U.G.O.A., F.S.G.S.D.
impede PC sales
I mean, ideally, your new hardware purchasing habits should be guided by your needs. That is, if your current hardware [or parts of it] can't fill your needs anymore, you change it. Not the other way around, as the above does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?. Why should I even care about how PC sales are going, if they can't sell their hardware, that's their problem, they are doing something wrong. That includes the inability to recognize peoples' needs in certain hardware areas. But this world's most companies are not, for long now, following peoples' needs anymore, they push their products, and the interest is not high enough, they drop a few tons of cash on the pr wagon to get things going.
Of course, that is an important question from sellers' point of view, but they also know that the vast majority of those people that give them their money for new prebuilt boxes are not those who will get the idea of running older [but still good] software on older [but still good performing] hardware. But from the peoples' point of view, as usual, the whole thing is just the result of decades of evolution of market behavior.
For some time, I also had this urge of always having the fastest, latest hardware. Then I grew up and have learnt to buy stuff to suit my needs. Unfortunately (?) I'm doing quite computationally expensive stuff, so I'm buying. Yet, my sister has only a thin client using remote desktop accessing a windows on a virtual machine on my linux box. She will not be increasing PC sells numbers anytime soon.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
A side from the compability with games, Windows 2000 was great.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
"The broad question is, does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?"
Does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's television shows on television sets that are several decades old impede television sales? You don't typically buy consumer electronics to "remain compatible," but because the old one breaks or you just want something newer and better. The PC market is no different in this respect.
If you configure computer based on the guide. Then you will have to never plug this computer on any network or do surfing. I have seen computers without any Service Packs infected in a matter of sconds after we put win 2000 on it connected to a network.
I used to work for the IT Support division at a college and as many know it is not flush with money. So, we tried pushing off upgrading memory on comps from a 64 to 128 when Win2000 came out. Big mistake, say we did wait then we cannot put any SPs out, so when the viruses started coming out our network went down for a whole 2 wks, till we went and checked out every comp on campus.
These articles that claim a 10 seconds boot time using hibernation, tell me if I keep my comp on all the time, who is going to foot the electricity bills? These articles when read by ignorant bosses down at the Financial HQ, excite to cut our budget even further. Why do you need memory upgrades and PC upgrades, looks by this article its all hogwash. At startup we have 10megs left over, there is no way with memory leaking a sieve in unpatched windows machines, they can run for even 3-4 hrs without the user going mad.
A plea out to all the people out there, put an advisory on these articles only for the tech savvy and not for cost cutters. And in the end lets get over the fact that tech is mving faster than sound, today we can get 400$ dell with XP to do most tasks that a normal user needs. Why do we need to look at ways to turn back time ?
Just as secure, and you can have more functionality (e.g. sound!).
Of course, better yet, you can use Linux. I've got a 32MB laptop that runs Debian (with XFCE). A bit slow, but I can actually surf the web and so forth, and even play a game or two. And do it with actual security.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
As in, a machine from 10 years ago still uses just as many watts, if not more.
Now if I could get a good reliable "mom and pop" horsepower machine (i.e. almost none) that wasn't going to cost 2x its initial cost in electricity every year, forever, and had far less moving parts and NO FANS to replace every year at xmas...
Maybe the next Mac Mini will have high-rewrite flash (not that "mom and pop" users rewrite much if you turn off the swap and web cache) making a grand total of zero moving parts, that would be sweet.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Now, much is bloat, but some things that can heavily affect some ways to measure memory usage are perfectly valid practices, at least on systems that can take the load.
..was to disable the spell checker in his word processor.
I guess this goes without saying, as the entire article backs up this claim, due to a multitude of spelling errors, including words spelled wrong in multiple ways right next to eachother:
remove, renmove, reomove
-J4
Silly Rabbit: tricks are for kids.
Windows 2K came out when I was using a Pentium 200 MMX, with just 64 MB RAM to boot, and it ran just fine on it.
Not as fast as Win98, but all things considered, it fit well into a lower spec system than the article used as a reference.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Hum..
I get redirected to a porn lookup site on that page, but not on others at that site. Anyone else notice this?
I have a Cyrix 150 in the basement. Runs NetBSD in text-only mode. 16MB ram, a pair of 2.1GB hdds, some sort of S3/Virge video card- No need for GUIs or anything. Coding, newsgroups, irc, writing a novel... all that stuff. It's quiet, doesn't put out a lot of heat. Building BitchX from source took about an hour and a half, but it's not like the machine was unuseable during that time.
Days like today, when it's 97F outside, and probably 110F in my bedroom, i seriously consider putting the Athlon in the basement and bringing the Cyrix upstairs. About 90% of the things *I* use a computer for can be satisfied by that little machine.
do() || do_not();
I tried installing Win2K a few years back on my dual P II 450 with 768 Megs of RAM. [...] The boot alone took 10-15 minutes.
I'm not sure what was going on there, but your numbers are crazy. I ran Win2k on a P II 350 laptop with 128 MB of RAM and it booted in something around 5 minutes, probably less. It also ran reasonably well, but I'll admit I didn't use it for a whole lot (it dual-booted Debian).
So then I installed RedHat 9 and did something you can never do with Windows. I recompiled the kernel for SMP and tweaked it with the realtime patches.
RedHat 9 supported SMP out of the box - it should've loaded an SMP kernel after installation (at least RedHat 8 and RHEL do). Tweaking it for realtime, sure.
Also, Win2k Pro supports SMP for dual processors, so I'm don't see how you can claim that's something "you can never do with Windows"
Basically, I don't disagree with your assertion that Linux can be happier and more usable on old systems. I used WindowMaker, and Debian allowed for a impressively small install image allowing me to dual boot on a 6GB drive.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
You know what's really crazy? If you do a fresh install of the original Windows XP pro it is fast as lightning. Like, crazily fast. Only after patching it up with all the service packs does it slow down to molasses on a cold day. Like they say, security, stability, performance. One can't go up without the others going down.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I dunno, I'm running Slack 10.1 on my 200MHZ P1 box that I got from DEC back in the day, and it works just fine. (Although i cant turn on all the glitzy animations in gnome and KDE.)
Now it takes a little while to boot up, but since Linux is so nice and stable, I can leave it runing almost indefinately (power consumption concerns aside).
I seriously doubt that you can blame Windows for your sluggish system. Something else is obviously amiss if your system isn't running well with 768MB of RAM and dual processors. I've had various configurations below your setup on Win2000 - minimum was Pentium2 - 266 with 128MB and generally it runs well. Boots within 5 minutes and faster than Xwindows.
You should try this thing called 'Google'...
Perhaps you should. All the top hits agree that Windows 2000 was released on Feb 17th 2000. So does Wikipedia.
Yep, by continuing to run old boxes that still work, you are thus stealing profits from the poor hardware makers and should be sued and thrown in jail.
Are software sales hurt by the fact that their greatest (most versitile and bug free) operating system still works on my Athalon Thunderbird?
I was using a 500MHz K6-2 when Windows 2000 came out. I actually consider a 500MHz K6-2 old hardware but the K6-3 was sufficiently more advanced to be only slightly old hardware. A 550MHz K6-2 with 320MB of RAM and a Rage 128 Pro All-In-Wonder has the darndest time playing a DVD or even a high quality DivX Movie. However, switch it out for a 400MHz K6-3 and the DVD and the DivX movie plays fine.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
"Still 95% compatible with Windows XP, The Windows 2000 OS still runs very well on very old hardware..."
;)
And it still costs 95% of the cost of Windows XP too!
While I've done WindowsXP on simmilar machines as well, I think its a painful XPerience with anything less than 500MHz...
... and in the DRM, bind them.
Lets see fire up Word(tm) go eat lunch and maybe just maybe it will be open when I get back.
Seeing as I am still working out Linux, and I know my Windows pretty darn well, I did this interesting thing.
The specs:
- Pentium II 233MHz
- Intel Desktop Board (isn't their slogan "built on reliability")
- 96MB RAM
- 3GB Hard Disk
- OS: Windows 2000 Server Standard
For readers to understand fully why I did this, until about a month ago, South Africa had only one decent ADSL account offering, a 3GB account. These 3GB accounts allow you to browse any site at full speed until you generate 3GB of traffic (that's g/bytes), and after the DSLAM kills your session (happens approximately every 24 hours) and you reconnect you get worse than 9600bps modem speeds when connecting to overseas servers/peers, but local speeds are still 100%. At the beginning of each month the counter is reset.
So, what I do is use OpenVPN (http://www.openvpn.org/) to tunnel to my office for the international bandwidth which we get through a 2mbit/s leased line, however, I have managed to configure my box in such a way that local traffic goes straight over the ADSL.
Using Windows 2000 Routing and remote access on my machine at home, I create the tunnel, and also create a ppp connection using RAS PPPoE (http://www.raspppoe.com/) - seeing as Windows 2000 doesn't have it natively. I then set up NAT routing, make the OpenVPN TUN/TAP adapter and the ppp interface external interfaces, and the LAN card the internal interface.
Then for routes, I set my default route to go down the tunnel, and I natuarlly set up the IP address of the remote end of the tunnel to go down the ppp interface. Now, South Africa has relatively few ASNs, so I also manually added a whole lot of those blocks to my routing table to go down the ppp interface. The net result (excuse the pun) was that local traffic went straight over the ADSL, and international traffic via the tunnel.
This all runs perfectly on Windows 2000 Server on that old box. Unlike the author of the article, I don't ever "work" on the machine per se, so for security reason's it does all it's Windows Updates, while I installed no extra services like IIS, I haven't bothered to disable any default services, I have however turned off Active Desktop, sliding menus and the Activity Pane for Windows Explorer, I discovered a long time ago that turning these off was the simplest way to more than double the responsiveness of their systems. What I have also done is enabled Terminal Services in remote administration mode, so the machine needs no screen keyboard and mouse. I add that I am no security expert however, with the box fully patched and a strong password set, I have had NO security incidences, well, at least none that I am aware of, I also do not run any kind of firewall.
Now my routing works well and causes *almost* no problems, it does have issues nevertheless. Because my box has two external IP addresses, certain things have issues, the problem arises when an application registers on an international server, and other peers from South Africa try connecting to my tunnel interface IP address, this doesnt work because my Windows 2000 box ends up trying to send the packets back over the PPP inteface. I notice this the most with Source and Steam. I cannot connect to any local servers when my tunnel IP address is the one registered with the Steam server, it just keeps on asking for my Steam username and password. Top get around this, when I want to play, I merely end up doing a PPPoE direct from my desktop, and while it takes a while for Steam to sign in, it does work. While I know that I could manually setup the steam server IPs to route over the ppp, I just havent bothered, also this way when an update comes down, it always comes down the fastest.
I am experimenting with Linux, and especially along with Soekris (http://www.soekris.com/) boards, to replace this solution, just a little more time and I will have it worked out - but I am not rushed as my Windows 2000 Server solution works just as well - and is up and running already.
We see a performance hit with XP until I turn off all the fancy garbage. My Computer->Properties->Advanced->Performance->Visua l Effects
Turning off most of that stuff will help. There are many other ways to speed it up significantly. Even if the number crunching speed does not improve, the interface speed-up is very noticible.
Another little known feature is the XP Compatibility mode. Right click on a program executable and choose the compatibility tab. You can emulate Win 95, 98/Me, NT, 2K. We use this to run older software and it works just fine.
Oh yeah. I recently bought a new laptop. It of course came with windows XP. After getting frusterated for a week with all the lame "wizards" for everything (discussion of how confusing XP wizards are saved for another thread), I decided to load windows 2000 on it. Within an hour or two I was able to find W2K drivers for all the hardware on the laptop and start loading. I was slightly surprised to find that some of the W2K drivers actually worked better and had more options then the XP version (was true for both the wireless card and processor speed control).
In use I found that the biggest difference was that I had to install 3rd party software on 2000 to do a few things like handle zip files and burn CDs. In all cases the 3rd party software is more powerful then the built-in XP stuff anyway. I am way more efficient in W2K with it's cleaner interface to administrative functions. All things considered, I view moving from XP to 2000 an "upgrade".
XP is to 2000 as ME is to 98SE. The former in each case being a product with more "widget" features, but less usability.
Lets see, 2000 was 5 years ago, so 8 year old hardware was only 3 years old when win2k came out.
Not all that suprizing. XP runs fairly well on a Pentium 4 or Athlon XP doesn't it? (3 year old hardware)
==>Lazn
Hard to quantify.
But the fact that it pisses Intel off is a certainity!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Eh, SCSI2 is fucking slow. Current model IDE drives would spank it.
My Celeron 300A@450 w/ 256M runs quite nicely. Boot time is under a minute, logged into the domain and idle at the desktop. It does run a modern IDE drive though.
I'd suspect drivers more than the drives though. 15 minutes is just woeful. Booting from flash would be quicker.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
"Win2000 Still Performs on 8-year-old Hardware"
It sounds like a punchline to a bad Michael Jackson joke.
I give men fish.
Don't kill me for saying so, all right? I'm a big fan of the open source movement. I'm a big fan of Linux, in theory at least. I've tried to get various mainstream Linux distributions to run on my boxes (Mandrake, Red Hat, even Damn Small Linux), but they just won't go. Only Knoppix and Ubuntu will work, and they don't work well. Win2k runs wonderfully. I even stuck it on my old Toshiba laptop (PII, 128 megs RAM) and it runs like a dream. So don't brag to me about how Linux is so much hotter than WIn2k. That's just not true on my machines.
With MS, you just buy a license for the latest OS - XP - and you may then use it to run any old version. Need to run NT somewhere? Just buy an XP license.
The good thing about this is that when you do throw away the old boxes with 2K or NT, you have the licenses to run XP on whatever you replace them with.
honest to god:
I ran Win2k Pro for about a year on a 486DX2-66 with 96MB of RAM. Office work and Internet surfing only, but hell I loved it. Stable, and acceptably fast.
He disabled runas.. Thats really annoying, how else can you run with a non administrator account and still run other programs with diffrent privlege levels (like sudo on linux for people who don't know what RunAs does)?
/. picking up on the fact that its pretty easy to run newer M$ os's on old hardware too.
Blah, other than that its nice to see
I have Slack 10.1 on a P233MMX, a k6-2 500 (my file server), and a P II 450 (my firewall, web, SFTP server).
Who needs a GUI?
Unbelieveable. WindowsXP is pretty much Win2K with a different default user interface theme and a whole boatload of junk to make it more compatible with every piece of crap Window95 program still around. How can it not be slower? When you really get down to it there isn't much that WinXP can provide that Win2K doesn't and for less resources and hassles. Win2K is the best OS Microsoft ever made, sad they have stopped making a workstation focused OS. Yes, yes, WinXP Pro, but like I said, comes with bundles of junk you don't need!
At work I setup a SUS server running windows 2000 server. (when SUS first appeared)
What's surprising is that it's a Pentium 1 200MHz MMX machine, granted it's an old server but the thing runs with 256MB of mem and a couple of old IDE harddrives just fine.
It chugs along and does its job of applying updates across the network.
Course, we recently got a brand spanking new server so i've moved the sql db onto that and gonna stick WSUS 2.0 on the oldish Pentium 3 1GHz, 2GB ram etc server which was once the db server.
Little point in getting win 2k3 when you have little need for it.
for certain values of "very well".
Red Leader Standing By!
Back when I purchased my 233 MMX pentium, I was anoyed it didn't have a turbo jumper (first machine I purchased that didn't). So I wired the turbo button to one of the clock selection jumpers (the was before people started doing soft BIOS overclocking). When I hit the turbo button my machine ran at 266 Mhz. Only problem was that you had to preselect the speed before booting because hitting the turbo button while it was running caused the machine to hang.
But the guy in the article apparently couldn't get the spellcheck to work...
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
I probably would agree, but fortunately, my involvement with the machines was over after the installation was complete. From there on, it's the user's problem.
Howdy.
I have a machine which quite clearly has less memory in it than I am expected to have these days. Doing something like starting up Mozilla (in Linux) is quite a lengthy experience and often involves making a cup of tea,and sipping it whilst waiting for it to finish loading.
The problem I've experienced with XP in an environment with little RAM seems to involve the aggressive swap to disk it seems fond of doing when running certain applications. I expect it is constantly going "oops almost out of memory" and swapping out to disk, but isn't actually swapping in anything useful in its place. There doesn't seem to be the slowness which you normally get if you end up resorting to constanly reading pages in from swap, so I can only assume it is over eagerness to free some RAM.
In some ways this would impede hardware sales, and in some ways, no. For example, I worked for a company in 2001/2 that was still using 386s, running dos. There had not changed, because the software used for them was still used in their industry. It was only after I started working for them, that a newer version of the software came out, and they contemplated moving to windows98 to run the new version. Let's just say they were slow adopters of new things, neh? And not really in a bad way. However, the down side of such older machines, was that they tended to fail fairly often. Perhaps not as much as could be expected, but enough not to call them 'reliable machines'. Computers are subject to the failure of moving parts, and the effects of heat on the rest of the machine itself. This means that hardware sales will always be around. Of course, this doesn't mean that companies will be changing out their entire stock of machines every couple of years, so I suppose it depends on what is considered 'slow hardware sales', neh? I'm sure the hardware manufacturers would love it if we got new machines every 3 months :P
Just my 2 coppers.
One I liked was called A10 Tank Killer. You flied an A10 warthog. Try playing it on a modern machine and as soon as you hit the gas to take off, you've already crashed into a mountain very far from where you started.
First off why would you assume you need KDE? Run oh say ICEWM and stick the web browser, email, and office apps on the menu and it's good to go.
And second, yes, I've got hardware that old, and it runs KDE fairly well, with the animations and extraneous fluff turned off.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
To which word or phrase are you refering? Linking to an old Slashdot article that is itself full of links doesn't convey any useful information.
does ... impede PC sales?
I'm not too fond of idea of artificially inducing sales. New hardware/services should be purchased when they fulful some need, not just because someone can make the old solution stop working. The "is this impeding new pc sales" line of thought comes from the mindset that the world owes manufacturers sales, whether they want the products or not.
Maybe it is just that the difference between a Pentium 4 running at 500MHz and one running at 2GHz is less perceptible to a human than the difference between 50MHz and 200 MHz was a decade ago. Gee, my 15 year old car still runs on the same highways and uses the same gas as all the newer cars. Maybe we should change the gas formula every 4 years so people will have to buy new cars...
I have found one reason to use XP above 2K: Wireless networking.
XP has wireless networking integrated into it, while 2K you depend on the manufacturer piece of crap software. Needless to say that most of the manufacturer software will slow to a crawl any system you install on (at least linksys did that on my 233 PII/96 MB laptop).
My other OS is the MCP!
We used to have a Test PC at my first job. we had GHOST images for every OS (95, OSR1, OSR2, 98, SE, ME, NT, SP3, SP5, SP6 SP6a, 2000, SP1)
All ran fine on this machine (a HP something Pentium Pro-233 w/64MB RAM)
Windows XP would not even install, it would hang halfway through setup.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
www.ipcop.org
It will run on less than that and is a better firewall than anything running on windows.
(and it's free)
News flash from the year 2000!
..., woot!
The latest MS operating system runs on 3 year old hardware. Woot, woot, woot.
Fast forward 5 years...
The 5 year old MS operating system runs on 8 year old hardware! Woot, woot, woot,
It's really not suprising at all.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Actually, it requires the RTDSC instruction, which is Pentium+. CPUs dating back to the 286 (I believe) support the CPUID instruction.
Point of Sale systems sure don't need much processing to authenticate account information for dispensing non-negotiable notes (Federal Reserve Notes).
Internet browsing kiosks or dummy terminals don't need much processing to allow a well-optimized web browser to make internetworked requests for information.
All those computer screens in an aeroplane and covered-wagon bussing terminals, that output simple 2D text visuals for departure and arrival scheduling, don't need anything more than stability.
Can you say Nethack eXXXXxtreeeeme multiplayer!!!(?)
without prejudice
Who cares how well it runs KDE, run something else. There's lots of options out there you know, most of which are alot simpler and easier than kde or gnome.
Windows XP will run faster on older hardware than 2000 will. Windows 2000 is a resource hog, and even after killing most of the services will not run on a 500mhz machine with 128MB of ram very well. If you kill services in XP Pro and turn off the visualization, XP Pro will run a whole hell of a lot faster than 2000 on the same hardware.
And then there was E
I recently acquired by chance a stack of 300mhz machines. After toying around with the idea of running them as a linux cluster to provide roughly a 1.5Ghz machine with about 1GB of ram, it quickly became obvious that at the end of the year it would suck up about 5,256KWh. At $0.06/KWh, it'll cost $315 per year to run--about four times what a comparable new machine would burn, the cost difference being roughly the price of a new machine of greater specs to say nothing of architecture. After four years, that's a $1,000 difference in operating cost--by far enough to justify simply throwing out the old. It's an interesting exercise in extending the life of hardware. It just doesn't make any financial sense, even if you don't need more computing power. Considering that equation and the fact the, frankly, the new whiz-bang effect seems to be waning, it seems to me manufacturers should start labeling their computers like refrigerators and print the expected electric bill next to the price. Sort of "yes, your old 486 still runs just fine, but it's costing you more than the price of this new machine just to keep it turned on."
Dont get me started about windows for workgroups 3.11 with win32s!
I'm running Win2000 on a Pentium 166MHz with 96Mb memory and it is perfectly servicable for word processing, hacking code, data analysis and preparing presentations when I'm on the road. It can bog down on giving presentations that are graphics heavy. Still, for what I need it for, it works and can use the office applications that I use on my Win XP desktops.
Why would I get a new computer? At times the speed would be nice. I've been tempted but there are better things to spend the money on while this old beast still does what I need it to do.
I admit that I don't ever connect it to the net. The CPU couldn't handle it if I had to run virus protection and a firewall while I was trying to get things done. USB flash drives work just fine for any data transfer that I need to do.
I recommend using XPlite/2000lite/98lite to keep a Windows installation lean enough to run on old hardware. These started out as a hack to remove IE from Win98, but have evolved into general-purpose tools for deactivating the parts of Windows you don't need/want. I use them to run Windows on machines over 8 years old.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The slot-loading paradigm is fundamentally insecure and this toasting model allows arbitrary confections to have access to kernel memory. How long until someone distributes bread with malicious code baked in?
"Quantative Speed Analysis" = "Benchmark Results"
-Pope Peter Porker, S.O.W., K.M.K.R., U.G.O.A., F.S.G.S.D.
I love that bit, no servicepacks.... hell no av either cause they usually cost money too..... ugh.
That's all well and good until grandma wants to use anything other than that stuff or I'm not around to support it and my parents have to fix problems.
Jeez!
Back in '97 I had a short job where I was installing NT 4.0 on some machines. Many of these machines were only 100 MHz 486 based machines. Most only had 16MB of RAM, but that was upgraded to 32 MB in MOST cases. The worst machine, one that ran about as fast a slug, was a 66MHz 486. The machine only had three SIMM slots and 4MB soldered RAM. The only SIMMs available were 8MB. When upgraded the total amount of RAM on this poor machine was 28MB of RAM, the machine took several minutes to boot and was almost totally usable once booted. It was the best I could do for the poor user.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
Running an OS on a machine well below the manufacturer's specs and then complaining that it is running slow compared to an OS that fits the machine's hardware loadout isn't a valid performance analysis.
I wouldn't expect XP to run on a 32MB machine, and have never tried. However, you're the one who claimed I've not noticed any appreciable performance hit in XP compared to the previous versions. If that claim is true, then XP should run fine on any machine that runs 98, or else your comparison is meaningless (which it is, see below).
To answer your question, yes I did run 98 and XP on the same machine. It was a 1.4GHz Athon with 768 MBs of memory. On that machine there was no qualitative speed difference between the OSs on the applications (content creation) that I normally use.
Well no kidding, that's still a solid machine even by today's standards (or at least as of when XP was released). It's kind of the reverse comparison that matters. Your comparison is like saying I didn't notice a speed difference between my Pinto and my Ferrari when they're both parked. Obviously if you choose a machine that runs XP perfectly...you won't notice a difference. For a valid scientific comparison, you'd have to drop the RAM until one of them lags. It will be XP, and it will probably be when you get down to 128MB (from my experience), at which point all other versions of Windows still work fine. None of them is particularly processor intensive for the base OS.
To sum up, yes, XP is much more bloated than 98, and actually rather moreso than 2K.
I ran Win XP on a Pentium 90MHz with 384MB RAM. It dual booted Linux with KDE and both worked OK, using a SCSI disk drive at 7200rpm. The problem was getting it to install - that took about 4 hours...
The P90 was actually a P75 overclocked at 90MHz, which allowed me to up the PCI bus speed from 33 to 66MHz. Even though the processor was slow, the machine was still mainly I/O bound.
Since the machine refused to break, I eventually chucked in the dumpster...
Oh well, what the hell...
well im surfing the net on my C64 right now!... no im not, but having said that, theres really not much of an excuse to run a computer with hardware that old (p100 / 32mb sort of age), these days people are liturally throwing out pcs that are 600MHZ(give or take a few hundred MHZ , with at least 128mb of ram! having said that, its good to see a m$ product being used for something fun :)
I have Windows 2000 Server installed on a Celeron (64 MB Ram, 366 KHz), and it performs very well....
Gee, maybe unscrupulous OS vendors are using the malware / patch dynamic to keep the great upgrade wheel spinning.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
An 80 year old woman can still fuck you but do you really want her to do it?
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
When a computer's BIOS becomes flashable by interacting with a TCA integrated circuit authenticated by a software key, any expectable virus would target the Trusted Computing Architecture to gain pre-eminence in execution of code before the operating system loads. In fact, I could imagine a Virtual Machine virus, that itself loads the operating system that it can unrestrictedly surveilance the RAM and directly modulate on the communications hardware un-detected by software firewalls that rely on Internet Protocol. I only look at an operating system as a fish-bowl, and given the tendencies of modern computing equipment to feature more schizzophrenic code translation and execution layers on the die, it would be expectant that a viral code would strive much better here than in the vast reciprocal expanse of anti-code software that can only exist with the help of the operating system.
<speculative_fear>
What if this already happened; would it be known as a FPGA?
</speculative_fear>
without prejudice
Browsers aren't browsers anymore. They are operating environments.
If you still have a functional PC with 4 MB of memory, you must be curator in a computer museaum or sysadmin in a Kenyan school (and even there, they are chucking out the window these systems). =)
For really old systems (more than 10 years), My OS of choice is NT4. It runs on 16 MB of memory, its quite fast, offers excelent stability (once patched to SP6a), but most of all, it will still be compatible (albeit uselesss) with many modern applications.
My other OS is the MCP!
...that somebody noticed this.
Plain and simple, the entire xp family of Microsoft operating systems, sucks and the 2000 family is superior in every way. (please note: I am aware that ALL MS os's suck)
Windows 2000 has far less overhead, runs faster and cleaner than windows xp, in every given situation.
Who cares if it affects PC sales? Jesus, it'll be a good thing! For once we can begin functional recycling of all the BILLIONS and BILLIONS of computer hardware components that silicon valley has managed to vomit out over the last 8 years in account of well written low overhead software.
I just ordered a PC this morning with Win2K on it. In the first part of this year I ordered 50+, same config.
People in other parts of my department (or, rather, different business units of the overall corporate IT structure) order hundreds at a time. All Win2K.
Perhaps one cannot purchase Win2K in a shrinkwrap box at your local BestBuy or wherever, but corporations do still license Win2K.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
I`m running OS X Tiger on a 1999 G4 350 MHz with 384MB of RAM. And it runs acceptable - not supersmooth but acceptable.
So why the hell do you tell me how miraculous it is to run an OS from y2k on a computer from 1997???
this sig is useless
I got win2k to run on a pentium 100 with 64 megs of ram.
Yea, a bash.org quote for every occasion.
The punchline, of course, was -
overlord_overkill2007: ewwwwwwww
rhys_rhaven: oh it gets worse. she has no file structure!!!!!
rhys_rhaven: what kind of sick woman doesnt organize her files?!!!
Daniel: EWWWWWWWW
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Long answer: ... Wizardry would crash. ... Wizardry wouldn't :)
12 Mhz Turbo
8 Mhz non-turbo
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
I got win2k to run on a pentium 100 with 64 megs of ram.
Don't know if that's supposed to be a troll or not, but my dad's machine is just that, and runs win2k. Works great for the card games, online banking and such that he does. They usually get my older machines, but due to some hardware failures they still have a P2-300 and P1-100... I'm a motherboard short of a Duron 700. But for their use, it works.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Still running out of the box Linux on one machine, complete with KDE, Firefox Openoffice and antialiased fonts, on a 1995 era AMD K6.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Back when Win2k came out I had an old Compaq P60 system with 32mb ram, and some friends needed a cablemodem router (back when we didn't have these cheap little unsecured Linksys boxes). So I figured what the heck, I'll just try to install even though it was below the minimum requirements. Win2k installed just fine, though rather slowly, and on boot-up even detected and asked if I wanted to install a software workaround for the co-processor bug. Since it only had a 540mb hard drive I never got SP2 installed, it ran out of hard drive space downloading and decompressing the updates, but it ran quite fine as a router for about 2 years. Eventually the SCSI hard drive seized up when it was turned off over Christmas break and I managed to get it up for a few more months by hitting it rather firmly with a rubber mallet (I figured the heads managed to stick to the platters). Then it died a nearly natural death. So I guess the lesson learned is the minimum requirements on the box aren't always necessarily the bare minimum.
You're an idiot, then. My Celeron 300A (@450MHz) booted Windows XP in about 45 seconds.
"Machines really should last closer to 10-15 years before having to buy a new one. The idea of the disposable machine is moronic."
No, they shouldn't. Expecting a 7+ year-old PC to run today's apps is moronic.
Maintenence costs money. At some point, it's just cheaper to buy a new machine. It doesn't matter how well the system is built: at some point, a component *will* fail.
Current PC lifecycles are in the 5-year range. That's not bad at all.
I had XP on a machine from 1998 (almost 8 years old), 400MHz processor and 64MB of RAM. It ran fine, albeit a big slowly with GUI graphics, it was decent enough for everyday web browsing like I do now. It probably couldn't handle bittorrent with Azureus though (currently using 74/512MB of my ram)...
Ah java. Java, java java...
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/professional/ evaluation/sysreqs/default.asp [microsoft.com]
/ sysreqs.mspx [microsoft.com]
64MB RAM Minimum, 133MHz CPU Minimum.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/evaluation
128MB RAM Minimum (Though it'll install on 64) and 300MHz CPU.
You must be kidding (and the mods too). These hardware "requirements" have nothing to do with anything like "performance hit". XP is a Win2K optimized kernel (just as Win2003 is a optimized XP kernel) so XP perform better than Win2k. The requirements are just a bunch of fancy parameters based on the then current state of hardware (price and performance).
If you really think that these "requirements" can be used to compare Windows XP and 2000 (let alone 98!) as far as XP's "performance hit" is concerned, then you still have a lot to learn.
"Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens above and the moral universe within." - Albert Einstein
I ran Win2000 for a few years on an old P90 with 64 megs of RAM. Didn't have the money for newer hardware as the only job I had was as a paperboy.
I even successfully installed and ran Windows XP on it for a while (Devils Own), and although it was VERY slow and unuseable, it worked.
With Win2000 it worked alright though, the only thing was that I had a hard time writing in MS Office and listening to MP3s at the same time.
A proud member of the Onion-in-Hand alliance
but software has not kept up. I am running heavy duty processes on 5 year old gear. The VIA processors seem to be the direction to go, as they are 'about' the same CPU output as some of this old gear, but in some cases only drawing 20 watts.
"If new MS versions were as tight and compact, and EASY to modify as 95 was"
Uh, Win95 was incredibly large and bloated compared to Windows 3.1. Win3.1 and DOS could fit comfortably into 32mb of HD space. Win95 needed at least 100mb to install!
Win95 is not tight. It's a thin GUI wrapped on DOS 7.0 with Win32 extensions jammed on. It won't even boot on machines with faster than 300Mhz processors without an update, and it certainly won't more than 512mb of RAM. It's limited and poorly designed.
Yeah, it'll run faster than modern Windows, but that's not because it was tight and compact.
128MB RAM Minimum (Though it'll install on 64)
Trust me, you do not want to install XP on anything less than at least 256MB RAM. Actually, as I recently discovered when I had to remove one of my memory modules, it performs badly even with 256MB RAM - I wouldn't go for anything less than 512.
Who the fuck allows these stupid questions anyway?
25 year old Records continue to play on 34 year old record players,
Old VCR tapes play in old vcr's,
and Old cars even run on brand new gas....
Such startling developments all in one day.
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this", is a magnet for my -1 mod token. I hate to disappoint.
Win2k is a great alternative for WINDOWS users, but most people don't have the knowledge to run Linux. Linspire, however may change that.
ModLife.Net - If it ain't modded, what's the point?
I'm running FVWM2 on this aging Dell Optiplex that is my main system. I run TWM on my Macintosh SE/30 (both systems run NetBSD).
I have 'expanded horizontally' over the past few years. My 'computer' is a bunch of boxes connected to a KVM switch. None faster than 800 MHz, and all getting good use. I use the 800 MHz box for video capture and video editing, BTW.
What's "Umbutu"? Is it an Omperatig System, like Windowms or Macm OS X, or a Linumx distro like Red Hamt or Debiman? :-)
(Seems to be a frequent mistake around here, is it that hard to remember "Ubuntu"?)
I do this all the time - I get old computers from companies & the Muni - and load SuSE 9.3 on them and give them to families that can not afford a computer of their own. Looked into trying this with Windows - But the only way it works on a large scale - is with Linux. (by large scale - I mean that I have given out 14 computers in one day and have done 3 or 4 a day very often and I am gearing up to give away 250 to 300 machines this coming school year).
Advantages of using Linux over Windows in this project.
1. Quick install - Install and update everything in 30 minutes of my time - no mater how varied the hardware is.
2. Complete software pack - every thing needed to make a computer useful is included. (put Windows on a computer - and what have you have?)
3. No license problems - SuSE comes right out and says in their license that I can give away as many copies as I wish! (I cannot be certain that any install of Windows is ligit even if it came with the machine).
4. No virus/trojan/malware problems even though I am giving them a very modern computer environment. (True Win95 and to a lessor extent Win98 is less attacked - However, for this you pay by having a old unsupported OS that cannot be used with a fair amount of modern hardware like USB printers).
5. With the exception of software modems I have yet to have a single piece of hardware fail to install the drivers to make it work.
6.Lots of helpers - that have given free assistance.
So if you wish to give out large numbers of computers to those that need them - your only choice is some distro of Linux.
And, if my Linux friends want some software that Yum won't download, I can always login using an SSH private key and do the install for them. I don't even have to leave home.
Truth of the matter is that Linux comes with far more software builtin than most people know to load into Windows.... Games, starfield simulator, production quality image editor, office suite(s), typing exercisor, VOIP program, Kdict (a nice dictionary program).
If all of that's not enough for you, download the Knoppix Live DVD and try it out for yourself.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
i work as data entry in my university, in one of the labs used for classes. the machines there are 1.6ghz pentium 4's with 128mb of ram (not too much i know). their win2k os just staggers along miserably: it's slow, folder windows hang all the time, OS and application loadup times are absolutely ridiculous (>5min from a cold boot up to the desktop). stability wise, the os feels A LOT more like win98 than winXP. it's back to the days of w98 where you had to be careful and zig zag your way around, knowing that half of the simple things you can do end up stalling the OS. i know the stability and loadup time issues are tightly coupled with the lack of ram, but then not too many computers had 128mb of ram in '97, and it was slower ram too. disks were quite slower too so disk cache was also slower. i don't want to begin imagining that software setup in our labs, in a pentium II 300 with 64mb of ram.
5 year-old software runs on 8 year-old hardware! WOW!
Man. That's the stuff that matters, right there. Cripes. Didn't anybody notice that w2k runs on 3 year-old hardware, 5 years ago when it came out? Oh wait. Yeah. That was me.
Lets see. And the newfangled LEENOOKS that I keep hearing about. 2.4 ran on decade-old hardware.
But man... I've still got these old 12-inch DOS floppies sitting around (not authentic MS copies... bring it on BSA!). If the magnetic media hadn't degraded, they'd still run on 15 year-old hardware! WOW!
Great news day, guys.
I just finished an install on an OLD OLD HP Vectra Pentium-Pro and 64MB of ram, maybe microsoft DOES know how to make an amazingly good product!
well if my freebsd box (the hardware not the os) is any indication I loved just how well engineered it was. I meen sure it is old, and slow by todays standards. But the funy things is that it works, it does what I want it feels like a friend. Hell its working better than my "better" p4 and G4. All I did get it a bigger drive (two) and it rocks for the simple fact that well it's dam simple, and dead usefull. If I need 98, it's their, want to make a nice video or have a blast waching them? beos is their, feel like doing things different? FreeBSD is their.
I just built my girlfriend a computer for her new apartment as a birthday present. It's made almost entirely of either parts I already had or hardware I bought at Weirdstuff. The only things I purchased at Fry's were a $30 soundcard and a set of midrange Logitech stereo speakers, because she listens to a lot of music. Those two things combined cost me more than the rest of the computer combined.
Not wanting to spend anymore money than I had to, I opted out of XP Home and scrounged up an OEM copy of Windows 2000 Server I don't know how I acquired. I threw on all her music, some games, and a few other things, and the computer runs really well. My old Radeon 7000 works great with the 19" Sony Trinitron I was given while working at Stanford. The $20 Athlon 1200+ is easily fast enough for her purposes.
She was really happy when she got the computer, and hasn't complained yet. I felt pretty good about it, because I liked making something for her myself. It's also way more fun to be able to build something out of scavenged pieces. I made my last computer completely out of mid to high end parts I got through a wholesale distributor, but I have to say I prefer using parts I found under my bed, or in a large crate in the corner of a warehouse.
Really, unless you're hardcore into games or need to run high end business, graphic or scientific apps, there's very little reason to purchase new hardware. Computers these days are way too powerful for the average user. Add the fact that I actually prefer Windows 2000 to XP, and old hardware has a lot going for it.
[insert witty quote here]
I'm as interested in getting old hardware up and running as the next retro nerd, but on old hardware what does Windows 2000 offer that Windows 98SE does not? I mean, it's nice to not have to reboot the PC when you change network settings, but on a low-spec PC, Windows is just a glorified binary loader.
In the mid 90's I personally heard Bill Gates state (at a developer address in Sydney) that: 'our main competion are not third parties but existing Windows OSs - they don't wear out' he went on to say: ' we will fix that in the future'. Say no more ...
What the hell is wrong with you people! Eight years is not old. Do you drag your house down to the dump every eight years because you're embarassed to seen living in it? Of course not!
If there's nothing wrong with your PC, don't throw it away! Some of you guys will boycott deodorants to protect the ozone layer, and drive cars fueled by recycled fish sauce, but don't even blink when tossing out your six month old Alienware PC just because some guy at Nvidia called you a dweeb. Sheesh.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I have an IBM thinkpad 701c with 8mb of ram, Windows 95, and a cisco aironet pcmcia wireless card. Belive it or not its ok for telnet, rdp, and some IE 3.0... The one thing I like 95 over nt 4.0 is size.. OTOH nt 4.0 is definatly a nicer OS for machines with 16mb of ram.
I was refering to my own subjective views on the quality of my machine with different OSs on them. I might have done benchmarks on the machine with different OSs installed. If I did I don't have that quantitative data at hand. Hence, a qualitative analysis of how they felt.
Using the proper English words to describe something is not the same as using "weasel words".
If you're chipping in the cash to put 2GB RAM on every PC you own, why not pay a little more and put in 4GB (more if you have an x86-64 system)
Not really.
I installed Fedore Core 4 on my circa 5 year old PC last week.
I had ghosting on the monitor, even with the exact same ModeLine I was using on RedHat 7. I guess X.org isn't interested in supporting old hardware (Matrox 100) when they optimize for the latest and greatest.
Then when the mouse went batty every time I switched computers on the KVM switch, I booted back to RH7 and stayed there. It's not worth the effort, because I really just wanted to run OpenOffice.
Anyone know where I can get a statically linked OpenOffice?
I have some 486's around, and the first thing that fails on me is the Hard Drive. But, I have tons of CD drives. By using knoppix CD's and a home network, these machines sit and run. They're fun to play with. My favorite was setting up a live TV stream to the network. Unfortunately, a 486 and streaming video isn't wonderful, and I had to walk to my basement to change the channel.
Still, what's scary is that there are so many uses for REALLY old computers, and people often throw out computers only 2 years old! I'm suprised all geeks don't have 6 head computers with 8 drives by just grabbing spare parts from their friends/co-workers throw aways. Not a week goes by that I don't hear someone talking about trashing their old computer for a new one.
I8-D
I would suggest that the lack of compelling applications is the main impediment to PC sales. I run win2k on a 700mhz laptop with 128mb ram and I have yet to find an applicaion that won't run. (even google earth runs great) When a new capability that I want avails itself, I think about upgrading. Not till then.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
The fastest Pentium Pro processor was 200 MHz. (there was a rare 'overdrive' Pentium Pro part, but it wasn't 233 MHz.)
Back in my sophomore year at IMSA (almost four years ago), I ran first Windows 2000, then WIndows XP on a 200Mhz Pentium Pro with 128MB memory (72-pin SIMMs, yo). Performed splendidly, if a little laggy. Heck, I played *Counter-Strike* on that computer with the other kids via LAN.
A 233Mhz Libretto with 32MB RAM is not ancient, but it could sure use a bit more memory.
Speaking of which, I ran Windows 2000 on a Pentium-133/64 MB from 1995. Ran just fine too! In fact I used it for quite some time to play Age of Empires and Age of Kings with my dad.
I would be more impressed to see Windows 2000 or XP stuffed onto a 486 - or to see someone coerce NT4 onto a 386. Either way.
Wow. Such hostility. Have we met before? ;P
Maintenence costs money. At some point, it's just cheaper to buy a new machine. It doesn't matter how well the system is built: at some point, a component *will* fail.
Bzzzt. Wrong answer. We're talking home systems here. Not enterprise stuff. Sorry, but I don't have $2,000 to shell out every 4-5 years for a midrange server. (Yes. Servers ARE standard home equipment these days.) The system I bought in 1997 was $1999. I expect it to last me another two years minimum. And yes... under Linux it still runs today's apps. Name one thing I can't run on a dual PII 450 (with the exception of Windows XP).
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
you mostly find "remastered" versions when they first came from analog medium.
One reason I always heard is that the digital medium allow for finer digitalisation than what was proposed before.
The other reason I heard was that the remastered version isn't the same as the analog copy you bought, so you cannot ask for a "free" copy.
If they were to give you the analog version you first bought, you could (COULD) go and ask for just production costs and pay that.
Which brings us to the remastered part...
Of course IANAL, but then I'm a cynical realist, which compensate 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Can someone tell me where the old Slashdot went? This new pro-Microsoft Slashdot is weird and disturbing. And, to be frank, kinda retarded.
...
Maybe if I click my heels together... there's no place like home... there's no place like home... there's no place
fish and pipes
not Umbutu.
Jazz Jackrabbit?
HA! You thought I was gonna say Linux!
Not that I would want to either buy or run Windows, but as far as I know the price of the standalone Windows OS is so high you might as well buy a new PC including Windows. Then you get a new fast PC, and your Windows costs "nothing".
"You're an idiot, then.
;P"
Wow. Such hostility. Have we met before?
Probably not. But anyone who says it takes 10 minutes for Windows 2000 to boot is an idiot. Windows 2000 took just under two minutes to boot on a PII-300 system with a Quantum Bigfoot drive (ugh) and 64MB of memory. Hell, it booted in under three minutes on a Pentium MMX 166MHz notebook with 48MB of memory.
A 10 minute boot time indicates that your copy of 2000 is screwed. Maybe you should try to fix your system rather than spreading misinformation on Slashdot about how Windows 2000 performs on old hardware. Your results are not typical. Don't present them as if they are.
"Name oe thing I can't run on a dual PII 450 (with the exception of Windows XP)."
Well:
- Any modern game
- High-resolution photo editing (e.g. 8megapixel)
- PVR
- Video editing
- Gentoo
Of course, your "exception" actually runs fine on a PII-450. I ran XP for over two years on a Celeron 300A (@450MHz) with 256MB of SDRAM. It ran fine.
"Sorry, but I don't have $2,000 to shell out every 4-5 years for a midrange server."
WTF are you buying servers when you aren't an enterprise? A typical desktop system should more than meet your needs. If you need the managability and reliability of an enterprise-class server, you wouldn't be running it anywhere but a real datacenter with redundant HVAC and power.
"Yes. Servers ARE standard home equipment these days."
Well, maybe for you, but remember, we're talking about "everyone else". Very few people have servers (the $2000 kind, at least) sitting around their house.
"system I bought in 1997 was $1999. I expect it to last me another two years minimum."
Go for it. But no business is (and very few home users are) going to try to stretch the life of their hardware to 7+ years. *You* may, but everyone else realizes that that 5-year-old dual PII system could be replaced by a bottom-of-the-line Sempron system for under $400 - a system that likely has more memory, more disk space, is far faster, and far quieter. How much have you spent on disks, memory, and CPUs on your PII system over the past 5 years?
Well, I believe, and it's been my experience that, people who are in any way serious about computer use; geeks, gamers, graphics people, will buy a new computer whenever they can afford one as long as there's an appreciable performance difference. So I don't think the fact that stuff will still run on outdated hardware really affects PC sales.
That said, I'm still grudgingly running an Athlon xp 2700, 'cause I'm still saving for a 64-bit system. (And up until recently, my OS and my animation package of choice didn't come in 64-bit flavors anyway)
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
News Flash! Old Operating System Still Runs On Just Slightly Older Hardware!
Having used 98, NT4.x, 2K, and XP at work (digital content creation) and at home since about '97 I can say that I've not noticed any appreciable performance hit in XP compared to the previous versions.
No appreciable performance hit? Do you have any numbers? Thought so. Otherwise, here's a simple trick. If you installed your latest digital content creation software and XP on the same exact box as your Win 98 software, would it run as fast? Could you even install it? Probably the reason you don't notice any difference is your hardware is better. That's the 'tel' in the Win-Tel monopoly.
For your other question, over why companies would buy licenses for an old OS, AFAIK you can't, so if they want to install y2k, they buy the XP license. Now why would they want to do that? They might significant software investment in getting their myriad of software to work on 2K, and they have a business to run. You have to balance the benefit of keeping the software current with the cost of migration, possible bugs, new hardware, etc.
It is a potential hassle to upgrade to a newer OS - first you need to upgrade the hardware (yep - memory, CPU, etc) then you need to make sure you can either install the existing software or install newer versions, and then you need to make sure everything works like it used to. For example, if you're using Oracle 8i, will you have to upgrade that because only Oracle 11 is supported on XP? Etc etc.
Yeah, as for me I meet strangers in bars, sometimes hookers, and I have sex with them without protection. I am no doctor, but hey, I keep my mouth closed when I kiss them! And until now I've got no STD... that I know of.
Seriously, the Soekris boards are cool, but on some of them the NIC is quite buggy and you actually need to patch them if you want to use a cable shorter than +100ft. (No joke, google the "soekris short cable patch").
lucm, indeed.
Win2K Server works just fine on Eugene, the tower (and later server) that I custom built to take to college with me almost nine years ago. PI-200, 64MB RAM, 3.2GB drive. VX-III Intel chipset, sure, but it still runs.
This should not be new news.
Unless you know what you're doing and realize that most cable ISP's work by just DHCP and don't need any special software whatsoever.
Well, re-read your original post, because you typoed. The original post says Quantitative.
And I'm going to drop the weasel words claim, as it can only degrade into a flame war.
-Pope Peter Porker, S.O.W., K.M.K.R., U.G.O.A., F.S.G.S.D.
The minimum specs should be more like this:
1. At least 300 MHz Pentium II or 400 MHz Celeron A CPU
2. At least 512 MB of system RAM--the more, the better
3. At least a 40 GB hard drive
One of the big problems with older motherboards is that they support at most 384 MB of RAM, which in my opinion is not enough to run Windows XP smoothly. But starting with motherboards that use the Intel 440BX chipset, the maximum RAM installed went up to 768 MB, which is more than sufficient to run Windows XP quite well.
In short, machines built since 1999 could probably run Windows XP quite well; but if you want to do anything serious with multimedia processing, a machine running a CPU at 1 GHz or higher might be very good idea even if you max out RAM capacity of the motherboard.
it's a joke douchebags!!
I discovered that about SBC DSL and have never used the Yahoo client.
Didn't know Comcast was that easy at the time. That was the first client I had who tried it. I looked around on the CD for a simpler client (like SBC has with Enternet) but couldn't find one. If I'd known then that all he needed was DHCP setup and then use their proxy servers to get his MAC registered...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I can deal with newer apps having "bloat", or big memory requirements, or whatever else comes of a meritorious upgrade.
But I agree with the parent poster that a lot of programmers are becoming lazy, or incompetent, or both, with respect to Windows memory and resource usage -- they've become accustomed to letting Win2K/XP clean up after them, so who cares if their app sucks up 100% of the resources available to it? Yet they claim these apps will run on Win98 -- yeah, if you don't mind out-of-resources freezes all the time. Note that it is NOT *system* RAM that's the issue, it's the resource heaps.
I see this all the time, to the point that I no longer install newer apps on my main box -- it has a full gig of RAM, but for various reasons it also runs Win98. These new apps don't stress the CPU and use only a small fraction of the system RAM, and WOULD run perfectly fine on this box if they didn't piss away the resource heaps -- typically via a resource leak. If they actually needed the heaps, well, I could nod and say okay, but pissing them away to no purpose is inexcuseably bad programming.
It does seem to be mostly commercial apps that have the problem; I rarely see it with freeware. Maybe because freeware authors had to buy their own setups and feel the pain if it gets abused, whereas commercial developers just whine to the boss that they need an upgrade and a newer OS.
[I do have an XP box where all the newer stuff now winds up, but it's quite annoying not to have all my usin' apps in one handy place anymore.]
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I had an old pentium II machine I just retired and I'll tell you fedora runs dog slow on it, while win2k is mucher faster and much more functional.
But they overclocked very nicely to 233..
The overdrive on the other hand, was a P2 based chip that went into a pentium pro socket.. and ran at 300mhz or so..
Perhaps he meant a regular P233, since those did run at 233 and are more likely to be present in a workstation system.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
And occasionaly Solitaire
The Rage cards had Rage Theatre chips on them, which should easily allow a chip as flabby as the K6-2 and K6-3 to play DVD video smoothly. Were you making use of the Rage Theatre?
It always happens, windows gets slower and more unstable as it gets older.. Thus by the time the next version comes out, the old one looks a lot crappier than it did when it was new.. Conversely, the new version looks a lot better than the old one you already have..
Hence the incentive to upgrade.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Yah. Right. Because most people that have an 8 year old pc are looking for the sort of challenge that is involved to install a linux distro.
Do any of you linux guys live in reality?
I'm not surprised. Win2K is my favorite windows ever, going away. I haven't got it on a 486, but I have run it on an old PII with 32 MB. Slow, but fine.
I've had the same experience with XP Home on the machines of less fortunate family members - I've upgraded whoever was running it on 128MB to 384 MB. A Celeron 2GHz machine with 128MB and XP Home is slow to the point of uselessness.
Very interesting the bit about the diff re: home vs. pro. Is this another way "home" is intentionally crippled?
As for 3.1...it not only runs, it runs absolutely *fine* on 4 MB. All I ever had in high school and first 2 years of college, a 486SX-25 with 4 MB running win 3.1. I can't imagine the luxury of 16MB.
xp, similarly, will run just fine on a 266MHz machine if you up the ram to 192/256MB. turn off the eye candy and it'll do web/office etc perfectly well. a PIII 700MHz laptop? XP runs ok? no shit...
you don't need more than around 2.5-3GB to get 2000 or XP to run. you won't have a lot of space free, but it works fine.
move along people, nothing to see here.
Eh? Fedora 4 is the single slowest and most memory-hogging desktop OS ever built. You really need 256 MB and 1 GHz to get it running acceptably (ie not slower than my 7 MHz Amiga). And it's not much use suggesting an older version of Linux -- you'll have a nightmare trying to run modern apps like Evolution on it.
The sad reality is, you can install Windows 2000 on 8-year-old hardware, it'll run fast and you can still use 99% of apps released today. With Linux your only choice is an equally old distro onto which you can install barely anything without massive library and subsystem upgrades.
Will XP even install on a 486? I know Win Me refused to install on my old K5 PR 166+, so it seems unlikely that XP would install on a 486.
Lowest I ever had XP on was a Celeron 333Mhz, which started with 64MB and got upgraded to 128MB. It swapped a lot but you could use it.
"Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott
Indeed. I use 2kPro exclusively for my Windows needs. I've used all Windows variants and find 2kPro with the latest service pack/updates, and the latest IE (just for the library updates. I use Mozilla.) to be the best nexus of compatibility, stability, speed, and overhead.
I'm also of the opinion that XP has too many useless bells and whistles that just get in the way. IMO, 2kPro SP4 is the apex of the Windows platform, for what that's worth.
- Any modern game (I've run Unreal 2003 and Quake 3 on that system. I'm not a gamer though, so I don't care. I still think Riven and Myst are the best games known to man.)
- High-resolution photo editing (e.g. 8megapixel) I do this all the time with GIMP. Some of my largest images are 500 megs each (high resolution scans). The system handles them well and is very responsive. In fact the dual P II 450 is my main photo editing system via my remote desktop setup (Using Linux + GIMP).
- PVRHeheheh... done that too. As long as you have a decent capture card (PVR-250 rules for PVR functions in Linux) you could use a non-MMX Pentium 200 and still get decent results.
- Video editingBzzzzt. Wrong again. When I was still running Windows on that box (NT 4), I used Sonic Foundry software for video editing and again, it worked great. These were standard 640x480 video captures from an analog camcorder. I don't use DV because I don't have DV, but I'm pretty sure this system would rock with that as well.
- GentooI ran Gentoo on a Pentium 100.
Sure it took a long time to build, but it worked just fine. So I imagine running it on a dual PII 250 would scream by comparison. I've also got a P4 system (for professional audio work). It came with XP Pro but it's now running a very customized RedHat 9 and it runs much faster in Linux than in Windows. The funny thing is that desktop performance of Windows XP Pro is the same on that system as RedHat 9 desktop performance on the dual P II 450. The P4 also has a gig of RAM vs. the dual's 768 megs. Sorry, but on every count in this argument you lose. As long as I continue to run customized versions of Linux I can make the hardware last much longer than I ever could with Windows. You just can't tweak Windows enough to make a system scream. I don't care what registry settings you change, Windows is a pig and is the main reason people get rid of systems too early. The fact that I run tons of stuff on the dual PII 450 proves it to me. Yes... I have a longer initial set up time, but the system performs much better than Windows would ever make it run.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I cannot answer for Win2k or WinXP running "fine"
on a 486 system. The parent poster is, IMHO,
correct in the assessment that the ammount of
main memory is the key to functionality.
I bought what I considered to be "bleeding edge"
hardware in 1998, P-III/600 Mhz SMP and 512 MB
memory, FW-SCSI and RAID-0. I was running NT4 on
this box up to the point that MSFT pulled the plug
on support. Rather than running XP, I went with
Win2K, and upon reflection I am certain I made the
right choice. Before I "upgrade" to XP, this will
be a linux platform. The MSFT licensing issues (License
6 and the more recent EULAs) have driven
me away from any further MSFT products.
While dual 600 MHz processors may seem pretty lame
these days, the computer runs faster that any two
applications I could run on it. The amount of
memory is the key, because there is normally little
or no swapping to the pagefile. And when there is,
the RAID-0 SCSI keeps swaps fast enough not to
be irritating.
Nope, that unfortunately could only be obtained on an original CD and can't legally be downloaded. As with most DVD Playback software. I was using PowerDVD since that came with the DVD-ROM.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
at my work we run windows 2000 on a pentium II 200mhz
works fine
Well, pretty much anyone I went to school with can run AdAware. Not that many of them can figure out kernel modules for a new CDR.
Not many of them can do that for WIndows, either.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
No problem I said. We went into my space. I popped the side off of my computter, pulled the old card out and inserted his Voodo card.. then I booted the box...I think it was RedHat 7.2 at the time.
Kudzu popped up:
- It looks like you removed your old video card -- confirm [yes]
- It looks like you have a new video card (Voodo 3) -- confirm [yes].
The system then finished booting, and came to the (GUI) login screen... I was happy.I turned to the seller, and he was in the process of picking his jaw off of the ground. ... "Thats it??!
I understood his surprise when I went to boot the same box into Windows later... It took a lot more time and energy to get Windows working with the new video card. I understand why Windows users are so paranoid about the idea of doing any sort of changes to their systems.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Yes, but does $NEWFANGLEDDEVICE work this way? Can your mom get... ohhh let's say:
- USB mass storage
- USB Video Capture device
to work on her own with Linux? Are the modules installed?
Device support is good on Linux now, but it is nowhere as easy to maintain as Windows for an average home user.
XP may have an "optimized" kernel, but it also adds more new code as well. NX-bit support in the kernel, additional GUI code, feature creep, etc.
Each generation will have optimisations as well as added code. While I can't speak to XP in particular, unless there's a drive for optimization, the two normally tend to balance out at best during a normal development cycle. Otherwise, there would be no reason to upgrade hardware, as Windows XP would run faster on a Pentium II 266 with 128MB RAM than NT 3.5. (Since, after all, the XP kernel is 3 generations of optimizations.)
-Pope Peter Porker, S.O.W., K.M.K.R., U.G.O.A., F.S.G.S.D.
> XP may have an "optimized" kernel
Optimized kernel means better performance. The original poster suggested that XP has some "performance hit" when compared to Windows 2000 or even 98.
"Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens above and the moral universe within." - Albert Einstein
Optimized means that some part of the kernel has better performance.
My point is that while I'm sure there were some optimizations, there was enough extra added that the optimizations may be a moot point.
Plus there's a lot more to an operating system than just the kernel.
-Pope Peter Porker, S.O.W., K.M.K.R., U.G.O.A., F.S.G.S.D.
Certainly nothing prevents you from staying with Windows 98 or any other obsolete OS.
"Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens above and the moral universe within." - Albert Einstein
Exactly.
The only reason for us going Win98 > Win2000 was roaming profiles and "real" domain logins, and it's the smallest change of UI to make things simpler on those less-than computer literate.
-Pope Peter Porker, S.O.W., K.M.K.R., U.G.O.A., F.S.G.S.D.
I like this post.
D'Oh, silly me. I forgot I paid ATi some money for a copy of the ATi DVD player install CD.
"CPUs dating back to the 286 (I believe) support the CPUID instruction."
Wrong. Please actually look at some documentation or spec sheets before you guess.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!