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XP On 8-MHz Pentium With 20 MB RAM

Posted by kdawson on from the golden-hourglass dept.

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?"

5 of 410 comments (clear)

  1. Hmmm by KKlaus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  2. Re:Reminds me of the time I compiled Gentoo on a 2 by mh101 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  3. MOD PARENT INFORMATIVE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    If the GP can't tell the difference between a 286 and a 386, maybe he shouldn't be posting to slashdot.

  4. Cyrix M5 by bxbaser · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Ah by KillerBob · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well, see.... I once got Windows 2000 running on a '486 DX/33 with 64MB fo RAM. Not really that much of an achievement: though it was below the minimum required MHz, it had twice the minimum RAM to make up for it. The thing is... I never shut down that computer if I could help it, because it took 3 hours to boot, and the latency in responding even to a mouse click took several seconds. Compare that to, say, Damn Small Linux, which would fly on that system.

    Now. XP has significantly higher "minimum" specs than 2K. It's also significantly more "bloated", in that it actually does need those higher minimum specs because it's got more stuff running. The UI takes more clock cycles to render, and there's more services running. AND... a Pentium at 8MHz with 20MB of RAM has less raw processing power than a '486 DX/33 with 64MB. How well do you think that XP installation actually ran?

    Getting an OS *installed* on an anemic system is nowhere near the same as getting it to *run*.

    --
    If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb