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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?
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.
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!!!
What obscure hardware configurations have you managed to get Windows running on?
iMac with an Intel Core Duo 2?
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
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.
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 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)
"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
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
This was for a college extracurricular project I was working on, a rocket payload. We were flying a camera to take pictures during the flight, and the camera wouldn't run on anything but XP with their own software that required .Net.
It didn't work all that well, and it was a pain to get set up, and I definitely should have said "trying to do this with this equipment is stupid" but that was already the second camera I was given (the first didn't work at all) after being brought on with less than a year to launch, so... XP Embedded* it was.
* There should have been a cap E in my previous post
And if used for medical computers, its an illegal operation :P
...
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.
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.
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.
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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.
It's also their webserver...
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!
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!
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)
Seems like they are using it as their server...
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
Reminds me of when I got ahold of a late beta of Win2k Server, and tried it out on my home Win95 system. It was a P200 with 64MB RAM, which seemed fine and dandy... but my fatal error was giving it the spare 1GB partition (which I used to experiment with Linux distros) of my 5GB drive, so I wouldn't have to touch the FAT32 partition at all. Hey, it met all the system requirements, so why not?
;)
It installed, but left less than 100MB left on the partition. After the final reboot, it sucked up the last bit of disk space for the swapfile, and it started configuring itself... About an hour later, it seemed to be finished, and I tried to log in. Up came a big window for setting up Active Directory. For the next several hours, the computer did nothing but swap to and from the woefully undersized pagefile, completely unresponsive to my vain attempts at input. I let it sit overnight, and finally gave up the next morning and wiped the partition.
Didn't occur to me at the time, but all I needed was a little more disk space for the pagefile, and then it would have at least booted properly, even if not been very fun to use. As it was, I didn't touch Win2k again until I had upgraded to a 500MHz K6-2 and 256MB RAM.
For what it's worth, I don't seem to have actually learned my lesson yet. I'm currently running Vista w/ Aero on a cheapo Compaq Celeron laptop with 512MB RAM and i945 graphics, loaded up with IIS7, SQL2k5, SUA, an X server, and so on. But hey, it _looks_ pretty!
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 just read Slashdot for the articles.
>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.
x86_64 processors fully support 16-bit mode out of the box. You can't execute 16-bit code [natively] from long-mode [64-bit mode] however.
When the cpu first boots though, it's running in 16-bit real mode.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
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
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
Eventually. You were pretty lethargic at first, but I found that running up to you, brandishing an axe and screaming "I'm going to cut your balls off!" did the trick.
Back in the mid-90s I tried installing Windows 1.0 on a Pentium, with little luck. The setup program would run but the system crashed when I tried to launch Windows from the DOS prompt. Probably due to incompatibility between the EGA video driver I selected and the onboard VGA of the machine; it might have worked if I'd had an actual EGA card to install. Modern CPUs and even the motherboard chipsets might be adequately backward compatible with XT-era hardware, but you'll have difficulty finding video hardware that's compatible with any modes earlier than 640x480@16 VGA.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
So why in the dickens can't someone write a 16-bit wrapper so I can get some of this "32-bit software with a 16-bit installer" to install on Server 2003 x64?
(Microsoft Great Plains version 9 if anyone cares)
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
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
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. :-)
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!