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XP On 8-MHz Pentium With 20 MB RAM
swehack writes "The guys over at winhistory.de managed to get their Windows XP Professional running on a very minimal box: an Intel Pentium clocked down to 8 MHz with 20 MB of RAM. (The installer won't work with less than 64 MB, but after installing you can remove memory.) The link has plenty of pictures of their progress in achieving this dubious milestone. They deserve a Golden Hourglass award for 'extreme waste of time.' What obscure hardware configurations have you managed to get Windows running on?"
....a Beowulf cluster of these!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
What obscure hardware configurations have you managed to get Windows running on?
AMD Athlon 3000+ with 1 GB of RAM. A miracle... I know... and STILL I have to reinstall it every couple of months!!
Vista?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Don't think we ever heard back from them.
Or rather, the time I started compiling Gentoo on a 286. It was 2004, and it's still going. I think KDE will be done by 2008.
Isn't this against the Geneva conventions?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Isn't this against the Geneva conventions?
Sadly, computers don't have rights, so moral arguments aside, I'm afraid it's quite legal to run Windows on them.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
How about installing Windows 3.11 on a 64-bit system?
Even though it is a little dated, I had windows95 running on a 386 DX 20 with 8mb of ram. It took half an hour to bootup.
You're using a 286? Don't make me laugh. Your Windows boots up in what, a day and a half?
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Actually I have a semi-impressive result in this area I think. I got Windows XP embedded running on a PC-104 stack with I think a 500 MHz processor and 256 megs RAM. Not so bad, huh?
But it also had only 384 megs of flash storage, and about 40 of that had to be free for other stuff.
I once tried to install Novell Linux Desktop on a 128 MB P6 Celeron and the installer refused to do it. It asked for 256 MB RAM.
It's roughly the speed of Vista on a Quad-Core C2 with 4GB of RAM and a 15K rpm RAID-0 array then?
=)
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
20 Megs of RAM? I thought 640K was supposed to be enough for anyone!!!
Oh the memories. I remember I couldnt afford a computer a few years ago, so I used a pirated ISO of XP and decided to put it on my old Dell Optiplex Pentium Pro, 100 MHZ, 128 MB of RAM, 4GB SCSI Hard Drive. The install took about three and a half hours, but the boot time took roughly 5 minutes or so if I remember right. It could perform basic functions, but more than one application and you could count on no activity for a long time. Surprisingly the machine never locked up and continued working. Im surprised the machine itself didnt just take a shit and die, I remember leaving it on one night and I could hear the hard drive working ALL NIGHT, I wonder how big the page file was on that thing..
What obscure hardware configurations have you managed to get Windows running on?
iMac with an Intel Core Duo 2?
Intel® Celeron® M Processor 340 [1.5GHz] + 192 RAM.
I tried putting Ubuntu on this laptop, not much success, almost didnt work with that.
Then, I started using a lightweight linux, which worked fine.
Then, I tried WinXP Pro, works good on this machine. Not excellent, its workable.
koolest thing -> I can play counterstrike!
It's a pretty big achievement, I think, to get WinXP to run on such a crappy setup, even more so because it IS Windows, which we're used to seeing require much more in terms of resources than a comparable Linux package. Maybe someone will figure out how to get WinXP running on their crappy but not-as-crappy box by reading this article.
It's comparable to the time I wanted to see just how brutal an environment Windows 95 would install
and still "run". I had this old narfy 386sx-16 "laptop" with 16Mb of RAM and 120Mb of HD. I installed
it with compression out of the gate and the thing just went in there. It wasn't happy with me, but
it was usable for very small values of "usable" and it ran stuff like Delphi if you were patient for
very large values of "patient" as it swap-thrashed itself to death doing what I asked of it.
It still worked. I was impressed. Wasn't USEFUL, mind.
This falls under the same category.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
All our accountants use 333 mhz celerons with 256 megs of ram to run a single accounting applications. Once you switch to classic interface and turn off unnecessary services it actually runs faster than win2k on the same hardware, and it is the kind of hardware win2k was mean to run on. Needless to say we are not planning to switch to Vista!
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
Computers may not have rights so you can install it on the computer.
It is just illegal to make somebody use it, it is Cruel and Unusual Punishment. If the it is in the workplace, it is an illegal work environment.
Fight Spammers!
I installed XP Pro on an old Toshiba Tecra 500CDT with a 120Mhz Pentium, memory maxed out at 144MB (actually a decent amount for that generation of hardware), drive upgraded to 6GB. The machine originally ran Windows 3.11, had a 500MB drive, and 16MB RAM.
Microsoft dropped support for the Tecra's Chips&Technologies video chipset, so I used the driver from Win2K; also didn't support acceleration at 24-bit (worked but with pretty slow screen drawing) so set it to 16-bit color, worked great.
Machine has a CDROM but BIOS won't boot from it so I had to boot the WinXP install floppies which you have to download from Microsoft; different set of disks for XP Pro and XP Home.
Not going to win any speed records, but quite useable.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
That'd probably work- by accident. About like a Windows 1.0 system would. There's enough backwards
compatibility there to support those the way they expect to enough to sort of run.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
So they win an award for biggest waste of time... and somehow I read about it on the front page of Slashdot. Methinks the award was right.
ZzzZz.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
That's nothing. I got Vista to run on a quad core, state of the art SLI system with only 4GB of ram.
OK, so it only sort of runs, the SLI doesn't actually work and a lot of the positional audio effects on my sound card have disappeared... but I'm hopeful that, with enough time for them to upgrade drivers, I may one day get it fully functional. Until then, Minesweeper is screamingly fast.
If you're going to troll at least make sense. Gentoo (and in general, Linux) won't compile on a 286. You'd need at least a 386.
I've got it running on my dead cat, and I can't tell the difference!
That comment was in the article. It was simply included in the summary, not added by /.
> But until this [sic] the record of the lamest XP PC goes from Berlin (Germany) to Vienna (Austria).
> {Image} The golden Sandclock Award
> {Image} For extreme waste of time.
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
A mac
"They deserve a Golden Hourglass award for 'extreme waste of time.'"
Uh... I don't think they'd appreciate that - they probably see plenty of hourglasses already.
#DeleteChrome
woooosh :-(
You have no sense of humor, do you?
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
Windows 3.1 in a window on top of DesqView/X
In 8MB.
It worked...
--
BMO
i was running win 98, with 16 meg ram and 255 mhz
How about compiling Gentoo on an iPAQ, or a 33 Mhz with 32 MB of RAM?
Back in the day, I was strapped for cash and hardware, but I wanted some server action. So I installed Win2000 Advanced Server on a P1-200mhz with 32MB (if I recall right, might have been 64 or whatever was the min required to install). EDO ram. Most services running (WINS, DNS, file sharing, 2 NICs to serve as a gateway and firewall, print servers, etc).
It was Ok for the first little bit. After a month or so though, it started to go downhill. At one point, I restarted it when I woke up in the morning, and it was ready to log 5 hours later. File transfer speeds measured in KB/S, not MB. A habit of crashing for no reason, requiring multihour restart cycles. I probably taxed it too much, with an ATI tv card install, gateway software,and other gizmos. It also got a few viruses that didn't properly clean.
Eventually it was replaced by other hardware, but for the longest time it was my leverage around the household. Anytime someone did something I didn't want, I'd threaten to put the P200 back as the network server. I usually got my way.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
How did they underclock the Pentium to only 8MHz?
As soon as a new Windows comes out, the old one is suddenly hailed as everything you would ever need, and a marvel of efficient resource usage.
Or, it may have been given to me as part of some other deal. Kinad hazy on the whole thing now... I canabalized it for parts (case, CD-ROM, hard drive, etc. were all still worth something) but before I did that, I tried installing Windows 95 just for the heck of it, and it worked. That box had 4 megs of ram I think, I might have had to add some. I don't remember how big the hard drive was. I understand it might not have worked if I hadn't had a later model 386, something to do with the co-processor IIRC.
This was back around 1998 or so. The hard drive and extra CD served me well for a few years. The extra floppy I have laying around in a box someplace may have come from that machine. The case, mobo, etc. Were either given away or sold for less than $10... it's been so long I don't recall much.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
When I worked at a computer repair shop, a woman brought in her system and said it was running slowly. I start the system up and expect there to be a bunch of virii. What I saw next shocked me.
After 30 minutes I'm looking at the default windows XP desktop. Immediately I know this is an illegal install, as the system had no sticker on it, and it looked too old to have had WinXP reasonably on it. I decide to see what service pack she's running, so I right click on my computer, click properties...and almost crap my pants. The system was running on a Cyrix M5 with 48MB of RAM. There were no service packs installed. She had about 30 worms installed and running on her system.
Sometimes, late at night, I wake up in a cold sweat thinking about the horror of such a system.
Hey, I'm working 3rd shift!
Yeah, I deserved that one.
In case you're wondering what the hell this thread is about, watch this absolutely hilarious video by Weird Al Yankovic from 1999/2000.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p0gKNQAGUc
You'll laugh, you'll cry, and then you'll go watch "White & Nerdy"
Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Actually sorry, that was a modified version of the original video...
e lated&search=
Here's the actual original video (much funiier): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vaNeaWQoHI&mode=r
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Next time try plaster-of-paris. I promise you won't have that problem...
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
I once had to overclock a 486DX2-50 to 66mhz in order to install Win98SE. This was back in 98. I wound up putting two ISA NICs in it and used "Internet Connection Sharing" to make myself a router box for my brand new DSL line. I wound up leaving it overclocked and it was totally stable with an uptime of months on end though the longest period of time you could go without being forced to reboot after installing a critical update was about a few weeks. This was before cheap consumer routers were widely available. It served its purpose well for quite some time until I was DDoSed by a script kiddie on a DALnet chatroom. At the time Verizon used to actually hand out static IPs so I was at the mercy of this script kiddie until I finally got Verizon to give me a new IP.
[an error occurred while processing this directive] The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later. [an error occurred while processing this directive]
They weren't by any chance hosting their website on that box too were they?
just because its grease, it doesn't mean you are supposed to use it to help the little captain invade mr. whiskas through his back door.
They deserve a Golden Hourglass award for 'extreme waste of time.' What obscure hardware configurations have you managed to get Windows running on?"
./.. or any weblog.
They do? In fact this is still slightly more intellectually stimulating than reading and posting on
386SX-25 with 4mb of RAM, 170Mb HD.
Wordpad took 5 minutes to load.
Would go to anyone actually treading the article.
Just 5 years before windows xp came out (1996) people could run computers with 16-32MB of ram (not very well, but a whole lot better than with xp!)
I fear the Y2038 bug
It was the only family computer for six months.
I once saw Win95a running in only 8 MB of RAM. Launching Netscape 4 would take about 2 minutes, but it worked.
Be relentless!
Not entirely convinced that's true, but you've been modded troll anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter. Certainly once could write a compiler that could run on a 286 that could compile Linux? There isn't anything magic that the compiler has to do, is there?
I once installed Windows for Workgroups (3.11) on a NEC V20 (8086 clone) with all of 640K. It would only run in "Real" mode and of course it took ages to boot. Oh, the video was a Hercules card, monochrome of course, with a 12" yellow phosphor monitor. Hard drive was a 20M MFM on an 8-bit controller. I remember that I installed the Prodigy online service's software on it and actually connected over a 2400 baud modem.
It's also their webserver...
It's been ten whole years, and MY install hasn't even finished downloading yet, you insensitive clod!
They apparently are also using it to host their website.
If the GP can't tell the difference between a 286 and a 386, maybe he shouldn't be posting to slashdot.
WP 5.1 on XTM PC emulator (running MS-DOS 6.22) on a Psion Revo (that calculator sized thingy that you forgot you put in your coat pocket). The little gadget has 8MB and cost me all of 5 Euros (about $6.57) used. Too bad it has no CF slot and backlight like the 5MX. but it works like a charm. Much longer battery life than my PDA running Windows Mobile, too.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
here
Brings back the memory of this site, which is hosted on a Mac SE: http://oldmac.toddverbeek.com:8012/
let the slashdot effect commence!
I fear the Y2038 bug
/happy gentoo user
I am trolling
I misread the title as 8-GHz and 20 GB. I assumed the article was about how they finally found a home machine capable of running it.
I have made a 3.5" floppy with DOS 5.0 and Win 3.0. (Most of it anyway; some extras like paint etc wouldn't fit.) There was even enough room left on the floppy for the sysinternals NTFS driver for DOS! I can boot off this floppy and access the HD.
I've originally planned to use it as a recovery disk for systems that won't boot. But I've since found a much better use for it: pranks. There's nothing like watching someone jump when Windows 3 boots on their brand new Dell.
All these n00bs talking about installing something on 64 megs crack me up. When I was a boy, I ran windows 3.1 on my TI-83 -- and was grateful, too!
There is a port of Linux that will run on some microcontrollers, and ELKS, which is "sort-of Linux" aims to run on the 8086 and the 286.
That's true, but is irrelevant. The claim was that Linux was being COMPILED on the 286, not being run. I don't think any special computer is required to turn C code into machine code. A 386 may be necessary to run that machine code. It's called cross-compiling.
I got Linux running on a motorized abacus powered by squirrels.
Then I got Windows CE running on an ancient Mayan claendar.
Then, utilizing quantum states, I got Mac OS 9 running on a single electron.
I rule! Bow to me! Argh!
I challenge slashdot to do the same exact thing with Ubuntu 6.1 or the equivalent Linux distro. The only requirement is that must be using it's bundled Gnome/KDE desktop running. ie, Ubuntu with Gnome (bundled version) running on 8mhz x86 machine.
No cheating. Linux distro must be the latest version using the stock desktop environment. No booting into command-line and thats it. It has to boot into Gnome or KDE and be able to run.
Let's see how Windows XP and a latest Linux distro do on the same machine.
\
Back in the 1995-96 timeframe, notebook computers with only 8MB of RAM were quite normal and generally came preloaded with Win 95. I agree performance was not stellar, but much depended on what you tried to run. I bought a high-end notebook early 1996 with 32MB of RAM and used to run Windows NT 4 Server as well as Window 95 on it. I continued to use the machine periodically until 2002.
My primary computer is an 800 MHz machine from 2001. Win2k runs just fine under VMware on gentoo (for windows-only stuff like Chemoffice, Merck, etc.)
That's right, 800 MHz + gentoo + Win2k. It works, bitches.
Proud to say never owned a cyrix processor.
Kids today have it easy, back in my day you just might have had to get a cyrix.
"last time i used thermal compound my cat had silver crap for weeks"
There's a warning on the thermal compound that you shouldn't take it internally. Now I realize it wasn't specific enough to mention cats....
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
True again. I should just give up tonight.
Seems like they are using it as their server...
This article was much more entertaining when I saw it on Slashdot two or three years ago, complete with almost identical comments about how they must be hosting the site on the test system in question because it wouldn't load after being slashdotted, etc.
What's the current record for longest time between dupes? I think it just got shattered.
They probably use a terminal emulator (vt100, what-have-you) to get access to the big iron that runs the database app.
I've used such a setup from 1994 to 1999, after that the system got overhauled to include a flashy web frontend. Mind you, you can still access the app the 'original way' too and on occasion I have to. It is much, much faster this way too.
!ERR: Signature not found.
I'd like to see the license they bought for that. Can that thing pass the "WGA" test? Is it patched to SP2 and have the latest security patches? If not, it's just another spam sending zombie. ;-0
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
A dead badger!!!
Oh, wait...
"I once saw Win95a running in only 8 MB of RAM. Launching Netscape 4 would take about 2 minutes, but it worked."
Count me in. I had a 486-33 with 8 meg of RAM and 95 worked okay. Granted, that's probably by a different standard than I'm used to today, but yeah, it worked. I played games and everything on it. I didn't have the half-hour bootups that were mentioned earlier. I'm curious: Was there a fundamental difference between a 386DX and a 486DX? Is there a reason that a 486-DX 33 would boot up in under 5 mins when a 386-DX 20 would take half an hour? (Same amount of RAM...) I think I may have been misinformed about the differences between the 386 and the 486, so I'm curious.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
My Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600 (Pentium 3, 1 GHz, 256 Mb) works great with Ubuntu. All devices detected and working. And it is quite snappy too! I've used it for internet/open office for about two years.
!ERR: Signature not found.
D-Link DFL-700 router runs WinXP quite well. It has 266 MHz AMD Geode (486 class CPU) and 64MB RAM. Just connect keyboard and VGA to debug connectors onboard (get pinout from Lanier website - they're actual board manufacturer) and plugin laptop HDD instead of non-standard flash-drive they ship with.
I set my Mom up with an old laptop. I managed to get XP running reasonably well on a P3 600Mhz Toshiba with 128 MB RAM. She surfs the net using Firwfox, she can watch movies, using VLC, via our wireless file store, and she can play Solitaire. Everything she wants in one box.
So first it's "Look how Windows is bloatware and suxz0rs compared to Linux which can run with negligible amount RAM!" and when someone shows WinXP can do it too it's a "dubious milestone" and "award for 'extreme waste of time.'".
I guess it's time for me to leave this fair "crowd" at last.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Do any of you know the origin of the term "break/fix"? There's a certain dangerous poetry in the phrase that appeals to me.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I share your pain, but am dutifully bound to tell you that you must be new here.
>There's a warning on the thermal compound that you shouldn't take it internally. Now I realize it wasn't specific enough to mention cats..
Even if it did, who's going to teach the cats to read?
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
Let me make a diagram
/|\
o -->
O --your skull (note the hollowness)
|
/ \
i remember installing windows 95 from a pile of floppy disks onto an old greyscale laptop that someone gave me. It was a 486 SX 25 with 4MB RAM and a 120MB HD, it only left about 40MB to play with
The inside of a cat is external to me, so it must ok!
I had a 486-DX2 66 with 8MB RAM running Win95. It took 2 minutes to boot. (However it took almost 3 days to install because I had to keep running around finding the disks and sometimes finding blank ones to write disk images of warez copies of the 95 install disks that were missing) There's another difference, seems that the mhz might do something. 'Twas almost usable, except that my video card kept it at 640x480x256. I even ran some game that required a Pentium and 16MB RAM on it.
"They deserve a Golden Hourglass award for 'extreme waste of time."
Explain to me why this is any more of a waste of time than making linux run on all sorts of inappropriate hardware. Seems to me there is LOTS of competition for the award. Don't just give it to these guys because it's Windows - let them earn it in earnest competition.
I saw this about 4-5 months ago. Yes, it's rather impressive/masochistic (pick one) but it's not exactly fresh off the presses.
Hell, I've done similar stunts in my time, but did it get me on Slashdot? Nope. So sorry to sound like a grumpy old man but this has been around the net a while.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
The tough part is getting XP to run on the RAM not the MHZ the lower Mhz just make it slow. If you could go down to 1 Hertz XP should still work. Just be about a billion times slower then it is now.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Was there a fundamental difference between a 386DX and a 486DX
Intels use of the terms DX and SX is a bit confusing
386SX-16 bit external bus, no internal floating point unit
386DX-32 bit external bus, no internal floating point unit
486SX-32 bit external bus, no internal floating point unit
486DX-32 bit external bus, internal floating point unit
there were also some other fairly major architectural changes between 386 and 486 at least according to wikipedia.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
My parent do not throw away nothing from our house, including 8bit computers from like way-before-i-was-born. We managed to have windows 98 installed on a 486 computer and i installed starcraft so my little cousin can play on it without bothering me. Tell ya it takes 6mins to load and clearing 1on1 computer vs my little cousin takes like 3hours;best 8 year old sitter machine in the world. Finally my little cousin can shut up and sit down for more than 15mins. --
But I did run Windows 3.0 on a 286 with 2 MB RAM. The RAM was installed on an ISA expansion card. Painful, that was.
> so I right click on my computer, click properties...
You worked in a computer repair shop and don't know Windows key shortcuts?
Still trying to get XP Pro to run beyond the WGA install with legal OS and hardware it came with.
A.D. 1995 or so. 386 or less (not sure). 1 MB of ram. 30 MB HD. Windows 2.x.
A.D. 1997 or 1998. 486. 4 MB of ram. Windows 95.
Somewhere around late 90s. An old calculator with reverse polish notation. Erwin, the AI.
I had Win95 running on my 486 dx2 with 4 MB RAM. It worked, but crashed at shutdown. Microsoft said it was the mouse driver or the graphic driver. With 20 MB it didn't crash anymore. Guess Win95 had swapped out code it needed to shutdown, but turned the swap off before finishing the shutdown.
Not bad at all. Seems Win95 was a leaner OS than we gave credit for it...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
They came with more HD space by far and ran on a little more CPU.
Running with compression on to fit everthing I needed on that spartan HD had an impact on things- made it like
it had about 4-6 Mb of RAM.
Couple this with a 386sx CPU...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Nothing beats trying to run Windows XP on the first OQO. 256Mb of RAM on a Transmeta Caruso chip. Clicking the START button can take up to a minute to get a response from the system and it sounds like a mini jet engine when the internal fan kicks on from the heat generated by the processing power it requires display the Start Menu.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
You can run win 3.1 on dosbox. I imagine there's a 64 bit port in Debian and elsewhere. With a fast enough machine, it should be about as quick as it ever was. It's kind of slow on a 1GHz class 32bit cpu.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I've run Windows Server 2003 on a pc with two different speed cpus.
You read that right.
One of the Athlon MP 2400s in my box died, and I didn't have a spare. I did have a spare Athlon XP-m 2400, so I decided to try it. Unfortunately mobile cpus boot at their lowest speed, so my server had one 2GHz cpu and one 600MHz cpu in MP...
It worked perfectly, except for programs that tried to use cpu cycle counters to measure time. Eg. I started my Counter-Strike server and it was confused as to whether it had been on for 1 minute or 2 hours.
Well, you didn't know that before you read it, did you?
-- Nate
I couldn't imagine pissing with XP on the something worse with less than 64 Mb. What did they do while thing was booting? Translate War and Peace from beginning to end?
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
http://mactalk.com.au/articles/68kpanther/ describes how 10.3 'runs' on a Centris. From TFA: "The victi^WMac used for this little project is a Centris 650, with 68MB RAM, a 25MHz 68040 and 4GB drive". Some cheating (Pear PC) was involved though.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Guess they haven't tried Vista yet!
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Did putting a math co-processor with a 386DX make it close to a 486DX? (or... did 386's allow for a co-processor...?)
(p.s. thanks for the info!)
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
What obscure hardware configurations have you managed to get Windows running on?
It's still "common" hardware, just because they underclocked it and removed RAM until the HDD screamed in pain due to swapping doesn't make this "obscure".
On the obscure side, I managed to get an Ubuntu Edgy "server" install on a HP Network Scanjet 5. Even got the LCD and keypad working thanks to some work a guy did to get FreeBSD on one, but unlike the FBSD project I have the full Ubuntu repositories and thus lots of apps available without needed to compile anything. It scans, emails, faxes, and copies just like the original OS did, except that no NT4 server is required and it can scan directly to a file server (you pick the protocol, they all will work). It can even do email address lookups from a database, and I'll have a fax address book implemented soon as well.
- Disclaimer: Information in this post deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
In addition to the other architectural changes, I think the biggest differences between the two generations of chip was the inclusion of 8k of onboard cache, the ability to pipeline instructions, and the ability to actually execute one instruction per clock cycle (under ideal conditions, meaning the pipeline was already populated with the correct instructions so the CPU didn't have to go fetch them one at a time, using several clock cycles to do each.)
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
and it was a laptop....it wouldn't boot to windows, but you could access a command line
I mounted it in a picture frame and loaded up a dos slideshow app
it cycled through pics of my daughter...bam digtal picture frame.
the only problem was there was only a floppy drive so getting pix on there was slow
My grandfather has (well had now that it'd been trashed) a Swan 486SX-33 with 8 megs of RAM running Windows 3.1. He had upgraded the memory to 24M by adding a 16M stick. I tried to install Windows 95 on it, but it kept crashing during the install. After a little testing I discovered it was the 16M stick had gone bad. Pulled the stick, booted back into W3.1, and proceeded to run the W95 installer off of CD. Granted it took quite a bit of time, but W95 finally went on. It was pretty freakin slow but I remember testing the system by playing my brother in DOOM 95 over the network. Granted he got to use the "frag me" machine, but everything still "ran"
Wow! My father has a computer he bought back in 1995 (or was it 6? I don't remember). Here is the config:
:)
8 MB RAM
1.18 GB Hard disk
150 MHz Pentium processor
It used to run Windows 95, along with MS Office 95. It was fine! I remember playing games on it, though most of the games had a minimum requirement of 166 MHz, so no 3D
He upgraded it to 16 MB RAM, and added a 1.20 GB hard disk later some time. Now it runs Windows 98 and MS Office 97. It still very usable.
You didn't read the article did you.
A friend of mine hacked a Trash80 Model 4 and turned it into a webserver. Yeah, he had to write the webserver himself. Still runs, and not a single malicious break in, I might add.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
How many malware authors rate their trojans to run at 8 mhz and 20 megs of ram?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I had a computer illiterate friend who ran ME. After 18 months of frustration he actually threw the machine into the canal next to his house.
(Not very environmentally friendly I know, but he think he'd had a few pints.)
No, the 486 is a truly pipelined CPU while the 386 is not, also, the 486 has a much more advanced (L1) cache. A 486 is roughly twice as fast as an equivalent clocked 386. Also most 386 mainboards had no L2 cache while most 486 boards do, this can also make a substantial difference in memory access speed.
It is possible to extend a 386 with a 387 co-processor (or other co-processors such as the Weitek 1167), but I recall these units where much slower than the 486's internal co-processor.
Windows can do the funnniest things...
:-)
Rewind to 1990. Install Windows 3.0 on your Banyan VINES file server. Then prepare a boot floppy with DOS, the Banyan drivers and nothing else. Remove the hard drive from a 386SX with 4MB RAM, boot said machine with the floppy and start Windows from the file server.
In this configuration, Windows will happily page to the floppy, that being the only local storage available.
These people are way behind the curve. The Mac community did this years ago, running OS X 10.3 on an old 25 MHz Mac.
Because of the software emulation required to run the PowerPC code on a 68k machine, the person who did the experiment estimated that booting up should take about 7 days. :-)
I have a 100 MHz 486 DX Laptop in the room next to me, which boots Windows 95 with 4 Megs RAM, without too much pain.
It is actually useable, can browse files, connect to the Net (Netscape).
Of course once you try to run any MS-Office app - you're screwed...
Tried to run mulinux on it, it worked, but didnt like the 4 MB RAM at all, no way to get a GUI up
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
Get more pigeons.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I got bored one time and installed XP Pro on an old 2.1 Gb drive I had lying around. It actually worked absolutely fine, without a problem of any kind. Of course, when I plugged in the ethernet cable it found the automatic updates, and gave me 'low disk space' warnings and shut itself down while trying to download them. Good times.
Windows 95 on Virtual PC running in OS 9 classic mode (emulation) on a Mac G5 running OSX.
(Long live the Ascii art collection)
It is ok, for you.
Huh? Hopefully a single process doesn't take up 20mb of RAM... even on vista ony 3 processes are taking up 20mb of memory: explorer, dwm, and SYSTEM's svchost.
IIRC, using BootOS2 I once put OS/2 Warp v4 into a 25MB partition and run it with 16MB of memory. Fully supported 32bit TCP/IP networking and PresentationManager/GUI capable but without DOS/Windows and WorkplaceShell components. It ran most 32bit OS/2 apps(GUI and console) but not any needing WPS. I don't remember if I ran the IBM WebExplorer or Netscape Navigator but I remember web browsing worked fine but I built this as a backup/restore partition.
This was on an original Pentuim 120MHz temporarily stripped to 16MB of memory. But the top command showed that the base system used only about 8MB of that. A test on a fullup Warp 4 system showed the WPS took another 8MB and yes, that's a CORBA implementation of a GUI desktop in 8MB! Something to think about considering I've not seen any desktop since which had that kind of deep OO capabilities. I used something called MiniShell for the shell of this rescure partition. It was some simple IBM app which used a simple text file to setup what apps could be launched from a popup GUI to get the ball rolling.
This was done around the time people were attempting to tell me that Microsoft NT v4 was sooo cool. They shutup when I told them about how many times it said I had to shut down an application because it was out of memory and then showed them the ancient OS/2 WorplaceShell and its speech recognition, networking, multimedia,etc of the day. Checking my old backups, the config.sys says this had a 1MB swap file. How large is the swap file/partition of is this XP in 20MB system?
Remember, this was a useable system if it just had more diskspace for apps. I still find it hard to believe that XP in 20MB of RAM could be useable at any processor speed since back in the NT 4.0 days, it required a minium of 32MB just to the the OS and simplistic Win95 shell off the ground. 20MB? I doubt it.
One word: usefulness.
Sure, someone with an older than dirt machine will now have a 'torch' to hold up, or maybe he will dive in and actually try the install. Good for them. And I will agree with you that it is an achievement to actually have this working in this configuration.
But other than that it is purely an academic exercise. The level of usefulness is what is at the core of this argument, IMHO.
If such a machine were available to you - disconnected from the net - and you had the choice of running:
1) a severely stripped copy of Windows that took 15 minutes to boot *to a useful state* (none of this '4 minutes to the desktop, dude!' bloviating), could not run more than one application at a time without severely slowing the system or crashing it, made you watch every element appear one-by-one while it painted the window for you, and had a really high probability of not having compatible drivers for your hardware;
or
2) a decently augmented modern Linux distro, that operated moderately snappily, with several hundred apps available, that could run two or more apps concurrently with relative ease, had the support and encouragement of someone who might be moderately interested in your [attempt|system|problems], and had a very high probability that drivers were either already available for your hardware, or they could be implemented by you or someone interested in doing it for you.
I have been in corporate and government situations were I have been forced by management to do 1), after explaining at length why 2) was the better way to go. It is not pretty. And the volume of user complaints are absolutely absurd. The argument always comes down to "We have a [corporate|government branch|section] blanket license from Microsoft for XX version of XX. We pay good money for it, so let's get our money's worth. Besides, the employees run it at home, and they're familiar with it."
I have also in the past ran an ISP that had a *single box* do everything: a Cyrix PR100, 16MB RAM, and a 1GB 3400RPM Full Height brick that ran 48+ 33.6 and 56k modems running on BocaBoard serial port expanders, PPP/SLIP/CSLIP servers, a telnet BBS, ftp site, Apache serving local user homepages, sendmail server, UseNET news feed synced every hour, IRC server, local shell access for users, a 128kbps 2B+D ISDN CENTRIX pipe directly to our ISP, and a friggin MUD! This was with kernel 1.3.19 monolithic on slakware. Stable as a rock, booted in 45 seconds (when we did reboot), moved like greased lightning. No GUI most of the time, to be sure, but we could run up fvwm occasionally to view a page in Netscape without slowing it down too much (3.+ load average).
We had *compliments* about how fast our services were compared to other local ISPs.
This was at a time when a local BBS advertised in our area's free computer trade mag that they had 16 WinNT4 servers running practically the same offerings, except IRC and shell accounts. Their ad said that due to "newer technology" they would "be back up only 13 minutes after a crash!" Yes, that is an actual quote, exclamation point and all. I still have the mag around here somewhere.
They say they are using 8 Mhz processors, but they actually mean 9 Mhz!
OMG NO WAI
Better change the Slashdot title as well!
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Gentoo (and in general, Linux) won't compile on a 286. You'd need at least a 386.
:)
I see no biggie in _compiling_ gentoo on 286 - running the thing could get messy
It is always better to be a first grade version of yourself than a second grade version of someone else.
In the mid 90s I was able to install Windows 3.11, bootable w/ DOS, on a 3.5" floppy. Ran slower than molasses in January, but by God, it was possible and worked!
There was even room on the disk for at least calc and notepad if I remember correctly.
I needed more hobbies as a kid.
- Captain Karikas of http://www.piratejokes.net/The ancient Britons got Windows 1.0 running on Stonehenge, but it crashed and that's why some of the stones are toppled today.
About 8 years ago while I still was in highschool, me and a friend went to visit a girl that was in class with us.
..something with wordart)... She then said: "Let's go in the other room and watch a comedy or something on TV because it will take a while.."
He went to the computer running Windows 2000, and clicked on Print in Word 95 to print a 1 page document (an A4 invitation
I was thinking how much could a one page print take but after about 20 minutes coudn't resist and asked her why it takes so much...
She said she doesn't know because the computer had 96 MB of RAM and should run fine.. When I right click My Computer I found out it was a 486 DX2 running at 8 Mhz... Obviously, the HP printer driver processed the page in Windows..
I remember reading about BOCHS emulation on the WinCE platform, which one guys used to install Win98 on a Jornada 720 (StrongARM 206Mhz, 32MB ram). It took 17 hours... the emulated left only 12MB for the operating environment.2 -1-1/
http://www.hpcfactor.com/reviews/editorial/bochs-
I love it when geeks [Uber] have too much time on their hands. If I were in charge, i'd allocate a day per week for geeks to just come up with shit.
.
Hey, my firewall is a 486 (66MHz) running ipcop. Web interface feels like swimming through treacle in winter (though I only log in once every few months to check for updates), but apart from that it works a charm.
NB: this is not for masochist reasons... it was what was lying around years back when I first wanted a firewall, and I never could be bothered upgrading it.
I thought my [somewhat] recent project was fascinating. I managed to get Windows Server 2003 running on a 350Mhz AMD, 220Mb (?), less than 100Gb system. You can read about it on my website and see the nasty pictures of the beast here: http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~shieldga/story.php?ID= 11212006/
Don't run as an administrator.
They should have tried running it with 640K RAM - after all, no one would need more memory than that.
Obviously you haven't tried any large open source package (ie: firefox or oo.org). Trying to get firefox to stay into less than 20mb of ram is a major problem.
PII 200Mhz, 256 MB. 10 GB HDD
F F!
Server 2K3, with updates.
IIS makes it barf.
FTPing makes it barrrf.
Indexing Service makes it barrrrrrrrrrrrrrf.
Basically, anytime I move the mouse or enter a keystroke, it... IT...
BARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRFFF
I have Vista runnning on my toaster! Had to upgrade the video card though...
I don't know if I've seen a single comment in this thread yet - just why is the software so bloated that it runs so poorly on older computers? There are many useful new features added, but many tasks - like redrawing a simple window - weren't any more difficult in 1996 than they are today. So why does it now take 512MB of RAM on a 3 GHz processor just to browse a file structure with Explorer in Windows, when even Windows 95 ran fine with 16 MB on a 100 MHz CPU?
Microsoft isn't alone in this - KDE and Gnome are pretty bad too. I started using Linux on a 133 MHz pentium (Redhat 5, I think) and it ran alright. Now, a 2GHz Athlon has trouble keeping up with KDE on Suse 9.3. What gives?
Whoooshhh!!!!
A couple of years ago Microsoft created Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs. It was created due to the rising demand of countries that did not have the opportunity to acquire new hardware and wanted the benefits of Windows XP. Thus, it is streamlined to work on much older equipment, and is essentially Windows XP SP2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_FLP
I can attest that Win2k *will* run with a mere 8mb of RAM. It probably wouldn't *install*, but it DOES boot and run. I learned this by accidentally hooking the wrong HD, the one that already had Win2K on it, to the 486DX4-100 that I use as a SIMM tester... which at the time had but 8mb of RAM in it. It took about 3 minutes to boot, and actually ran well enough for light use (about like Win95 on a P75/16mb). I was amazed.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Bah, do it manually with iptables. My firewall is a 100mhz P1 running stock debian with some handwritten iptables rules and it's as responsive as any machine I've seen.
I am trolling
yeah but it's running on an 8086, it will be a while before it catches up.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
To my recollection, Linux doesn't run on a 286. Perhaps you meant you cross compiled it on windows?
ATT Unix V7 in 16k. Yes 16K. 1978. On a PDP-8/E that had 3 users doing text editing for a lab project. We thought it was suppost to work. So we made it work.
I'm talking about the operating system just after boot, no programs running