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All you naysayers and linux can run on a 8088 and so on thake this!

The real min requirements for XP

That is pretty damn crazy! At a mere 20mhz running the system idle on the deckstop requires around 50% of the computing power! These people have way to much time on their hands hehe.

Not surprised. When XP came out I ran it on my P200 with 64Mb of RAM with little difficulty.

That's not too supprising as min specs are always too high (it's a way to make sure that said program or OS will run on system with the min specs)

Lord Revan wrote:That's not too supprising as min specs are always too high (it's a way to make sure that said program or OS will run on system with the min specs)

Depends on what you consider to be minimum spec - enough to run the software, or enough to run it in a reasonably useable fashion.

XP on a 40MHz computer "works", if you consider half a minute to open a folder "working".

Bounty wrote:

Lord Revan wrote:That's not too supprising as min specs are always too high (it's a way to make sure that said program or OS will run on system with the min specs)

Depends on what you consider to be minimum spec - enough to run the software, or enough to run it in a reasonably useable fashion.

XP on a 40MHz computer "works", if you consider half a minute to open a folder "working".

that's my point, program can run on less min specs, but probability that the program is useble is another thing

IIRC, Windows XP only requires something like 5MB of physical RAM - enough to load anything that can't be paged out.

With such small amounts of RAM even simple actions (folder ops, copy actions, god save you if the screensaver comes on) will bring the system to it's knees. To be frank, that's ridiculous: I'm running FC4 on a 400ish P2, and it's NOT 'usable'. It runs, it serves my files etc, but wiggle the mouse and CPU usage goes through the roof. Just TRY and open a file, and using X is a fevered dream.

I have XP running on a 366Mhz K6II and it gets the job done just fine. There are load times when opening most programs but they arent excessive, and once opened the programs function normally. This is with 256mb RAM tho, back in the day I tried installing it on the same computer with only 64mb RAM and it ran at a snail's pace.

This is not really unexpected, as Windows have always been more RAM hungry then CPU bound (back in '96 or so I had Win95 running on a 33Mhz 386 - it also ran fine, but only because that 386 had more RAM then was usual at the time).

I would expect anyting upwards of 200Mhz to run WinXP at a usable level if you stuff it with 256mb or more RAM.

Stark wrote:I'm running FC4 on a 400ish P2, and it's NOT 'usable'. It runs, it serves my files etc, but wiggle the mouse and CPU usage goes through the roof. Just TRY and open a file, and using X is a fevered dream.

Try a lighter desktop. I just got a 233 MHz K6 IBM Aptiva from my roommate, and it's not too bad when using XFCE as the desktop and Dillo as the html browser (on Debian Sarge).

Stark wrote:With such small amounts of RAM even simple actions (folder ops, copy actions, god save you if the screensaver comes on) will bring the system to it's knees. To be frank, that's ridiculous: I'm running FC4 on a 400ish P2, and it's NOT 'usable'. It runs, it serves my files etc, but wiggle the mouse and CPU usage goes through the roof. Just TRY and open a file, and using X is a fevered dream.

How much RAM? I was running full GNOME on a PII-450 for awhile- then again, I had half a gig of RAM to hold all that bloat... prior to the RAM upgrade, used Enlightenment then WMI.

Try a lighter desktop, like Fluxbox or IceWM