Dell XPS-B800 i820 Chipset WindowsXP Compat?

[wlee]

I just aquired a freebie 2000 vintage Dell Dimension XPS-B800. It has an Intel i820 Chipset and RAMBUS memory. As is, the machine has 800Mhz PIII ( socket 370 ) , 512MB Ram, 20GB HD, NVidia 32MB M64 AGP Card, Yamaha Sound Card, 3Com NIC. Is anyone running WindowsXP-SP2 on this class of machine ? Any probs ? I know the i820/840 chipset is somewhat of a "Black Sheep" Orphan. I'm just wondering if this machine is worth buying an XP kit. If not, any disto's of LINUX that will CORRECTLY support this hardware ?

Thanks!

 

[jfunk]

That machine should run XP fine.

 

[bacillus]

Originally posted by: jfunk
That machine should run XP fine.

agreed

 

[mikecel79]

Most Linux distros should run fine on this machine too. I don't see anything out of the ordinary that would prevent it.

 

[wlee]

Well, I just tried using UBUNTA LINUX 4.1 from the "Live CD" ( Kernal 2.6.7 ) . Besides taking a long time to load, everything worked fine. All the hardware was recognized. I just recall all the trouble people had with the i820/840 machines in the past. I'll try to load XP on it next.

 

[steelmanjim]

I just installed XP Professional on my Dell XPS B800 with 128 meg RAM & GeForce Ultra 64 and it worked fine, until I converted the filing system from FAT32 to NTFS. Now it works like a 133 with 16 megs of RAM running WIN98. Some guys at another forum are telling me I need at least 512 megs of RAM, of course that would be better, but Microsoft claims XP runs on 64 megs RAM (badly, I'm sure) and it ran fine on mine with 128 megs until I converted to NTFS. Any ideas? Now that I've converted the files to NTFS I found the Adaptec Direct CD doesn't work, there's no upgrade for it online (ver. 4.02) and I can't even make a backup and do a fresh installation without losing my data. BTW, I installed XP as an upgrade over Win98SE. I've since been told it works better as a fresh install. While installing XP, it didn't give me any notice about Adaptec not working... I downloaded CD Burner XP Pro and it seemed like it was working, until I tried the disc and it won't read. I'm just about out of ideas.... please help....