maxxed out pentium 2!!!

[Steve]

I have here one old PC!

350MHz Pentium II
4GB Hard Drive
128MB RAM



But get this:

DVD ROM
CD RW
WINDOWS XP!!!

HOW????

(no this isn't my PC, my mum brought it from her friend for me to upgrade!) Quite frankly, there isn't a lot I can do without changing the MOBO, ram, processor, HDD, new OS (no XP disk present). Do ya reckon its worth upgrading? The lady said she'd pay me whatever needs doing . . . but dont know if she budgeted for a complete rebuild lol!

She only wants to use broadband on it, so i reckon a new HDD and a bit more memory would suffice, but that weedy processor and old MOBO (Gigabyte GA-BX2000 rev1.1) would hold it back somewhat. Any ideas?

 

[baldy01]

I've had XP running on a Celeron 300 with 256M ram. Its a good way to learn the meaning of patience. i.e. it works, just very slowly. On 128 the system would be permanently swapping.

You might get away with it if you slap in lots of ram, and go look at some XP tuning pages. They'll tell you how to remove unnecessary services and background processes etc. I'd go for 512K and do some cache tuning to minimise HD use and swapping. Turn off all the eye-candy etc. ~And don't try using larger packages like office, photoshop etc as it'll crawl.

In the long run it would probably be cheaper to just buy a new base unit with XP on it cos even the PSU is unlikely to up to a new MB/CPU.

I personaly would stick a minimal Linux distro on it. There are a number of them designed for old machines like this that would be perfectly functional. But most people run a mile when they see something that isn't Microsoft, its too far out of their comfort zone.

 

[eggplant]

I've been out on some odd calls, best one was a 233mmx with 64 meg running (or rather trying to...) XP
Actually though, the spec of the pc you mention is within the reccomended requirements for xp pro.
Now have a think, how xp runs on such a system - then look at the specs for vista........

 

[breezer]

you could try putting in a bigger hd, and see what happens

 

[eggplant]

oops, whilst editing my post I chopped the bottom bit off, which said, I'd reccomend win2000 definately not xp. 2k will run reasonably well on it, disk space dependant on what else you want to put on.