Installing Win Xp on a PII

[AL BE]

I have a 300mhz PII laptop that has 96 mb of ram. No programs will install, my computer, and control panel won't open and i dont have the original win 98 disk. Would it be able to run win xp? Its main use would be to run powerpoint slide shows.

 

[Stumps]

yep it should, it will be really slow though, just make sure you have at least 1.5gb of harddisk space for the windows install and swapfile.

I was able to install winxp on a P120 with 64mb EDO ram awhile back....it wasn't a pleasant experience but it did work.

 

[BadThad]

It will run horribly slow, I don't recommend that.

 

[Tarrant64]

If you can get 256mb of ram or more, should be okay. If I am installing on old systems like that i just add more ram and it usually does ok.

 

[Green Man]

Here's What You Need to Use Windows XP Professional
? PC with 300 megahertz or higher processor clock speed recommended; 233 MHz minimum required (single or dual processor system);* Intel Pentium/Celeron family, or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family, or compatible processor recommended
? 128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher recommended (64 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features)

So, while you could technically install WinXP, painful as that may be, you may find that you are unable to install or run programs. If you could get it to 512MB you're golden. If you have about 10 min. just to open i.e. try to get 256MB in there. If you just want to install XP, but don't want to ever actually use the computer in any way you should be good to go.

 

[Fardringle]

I have run Windows XP on a 486 133MHz system before, mostly just to see if I could. The computer had 64MB of RAM and while it was far too slow for my preferences, it was completely usable for simple web browsing and word processing (PowerPoint presentations would probably be OK if you don't use animated transitions).

Before the system died, I have also played DiVX and DVD movies in XP on a PII-333 laptop with 128MB of RAM, so PowerPoint should run reasonably well on your PII-300 system, particularly if you can add some more memory to it. Again, animated transitions could cause problems but basic presentations should be OK. Web browsing was perfectly acceptable, and despite what Green Man said, it only took about 5-10 seconds to open Internet Explorer, which may be "too long" if you're used to a modern machine, but it's totally usable.

 

[Green Man]

Originally posted by: Fardringle
I have also played DiVX and DVD movies in XP on a PII-333 laptop with 128MB of RAM.

Shens.

Not without stuttering you didn't

 

[CrispyFried]

Originally posted by: Green Man

Originally posted by: Fardringle
I have also played DiVX and DVD movies in XP on a PII-333 laptop with 128MB of RAM.

Shens.

Not without stuttering you didn't

agreed. my PII 400 / 256 meg cant play avis without sync problems and stutters. mpegs are ok though.

Al Be, xp will run and pp may be ok, but more ram, like 128 megs is better. Ive seen XP run office apps fine in 192 meg systems.

 

[Fardringle]

A few movies had some stuttering, but most played perfectly fine. Of course, this was with the old 3.x DiVX versions and I have no idea how well it would work with the newer 5.x codecs, but it worked just fine for me. I used that laptop to watch movies while traveling. The DiVX files wouldn't play properly directly from CD, but if I copied the files to the hard drive first I didn't have any problem at all watching most movies.

 

[oynaz]

try installing 2K instead.