Pentium II 350 with Win XP Pro. 256 MB RAM enough?

[Eug]

I know RAM is never enough but I'm just wondering if you think I can get away with 256 for light usage on a Pentium II 350 in XP. (My office computer has only 256, but I'm still using NT on that one.)

I originally was going to order Win 2000, but at the last minute went and ordered Win XP Pro instead. I figure if I run it in Classic mode the speed should be OK. This is for a work computer mainly set up for image downloads and storage.

Hardware:

Intel BX mobo
Pentium II 350
256 MB PC133 RAM (running at 100 MHz)
3 GB unknown drive. To be replaced by 20 GB Maxtor 7200 rpm drive
Sound Blaster of some sort
Cheap 10/100 NIC.
IDE 250 MB zip
32X CD-RW MSI StarSpeed (DMA compatible)
ATI Rage Pro I think.
USB Lacie Hexa Media Reader (to read Compact Flash)

Software:

Adobe Photoshop 5 LE: VERY light usage, mainly just to crop picture and reduce the size. (Pictures will be from a Canon G2, and will be 4 Megapixels to start off with.) Maybe a little colour/brightness adjustment. Nothing else.
Some image filing program - Maybe Cumulus 5
IE Explorer 6 (to preview the pix)
Nero 5.5.9.0 to make backups of the images.

I have an extra 64 MB or 128 MB I can stick in there, but I'd just as soon use it elsewhere so I'm hoping with this type of usage I'm not going to get too much swapping with 256.

 

[singh]

You should be OK 🙂

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: singh
You should be OK 🙂

Thanks. Normally I'd agree wholeheartedly, but the Photoshop 5 LE business has got me wondering. (Even though the image editing will be light, the images are 4 Megapixels.) Hmmmm...

 

[smp]

You'll be fine .. I'm running on the exact same hardware 🙂

Gigabyte BX 2000
PII 350
256 meg of ram

it's great 🙂

edit: errr .. sorry, you're going XP .. right right .. I'm running 2K .. in that case .. "you're entering a world of pain my friend"

 

[Buddha Bart]

*shrug*
I'm now horsepower junky like a lot of guys around here... but XP on a 350.... kill yourself

bart

 

[BuddyAtBzboyz]

I'm going to have to agree with the others. Its not the ram that is the problem but your cpu. 256 is enough yes but 350Mhz is not.

 

[Bluefront]

This is crap....did any of you guys read what he's going to be doing with XP? It doesn't take the newest and fastest to to run well....many people have XP running just fine on relatively low-powered CPUs. That 350 PII will run very well, hell my P-Pro 200 runs perfect with only 128mb ram.

 

[nitsuj3580]

I'd have to agree with Bluefront. I tried installing XP on my P2 266 mhz with 160 MB of pc100 ram with a voodoo3. I thought it ran quite well given the hardware

 

[smp]

Originally posted by: tdas2
Its (XP Pro) is fine so long as you have the overheads such as skinning turned off. Then its essentially Windows 2000 pro with a few added features. Infact, just for reliability , once you got your system up and running under Windows XP Pro, system restore becomes pretty handy, one point over windows 2000 pro.

Who needs system restore? I have had system restore since 98;
format
re-install
bingo! System restore 🙂

You're going to be fine dude. A PII350 running XP in classic mode is just like running 2K .. and I run 2K and it runs very well with 256 megs of ram on a PII350, as stated before. Listen to no one but me, I know all.

 

[LostHiWay]

It'll run ok but if I were you I would disable just about every service you don't use to get the overhead to a min.

 

[Eug]

OK, I'll stick with 256 then. I'll turn off the skins and just run Classic. I'll put the other memory in my Athlon 1 GHz Win 2000 graphics workstation.

P.S. As for running Windows on a slow CPU, I'm with smp in that the Pentium II 350 running Win 2000 seems to be tolerable with 256, although I haven't done any of that Photoshop stuff I was talking about. The drive runs a bit slow, but I'll be swapping in a 20 Gigger Maxtor 7200 rpm this week.

I'll try to figure out how to deactivate as much as possible. Maybe I'll start with a laptop install or something, if that will help.

 

[smp]

I don't know if you should start with a laptop install .. just right click on the "my computer" icon and go into "manage" .. from there, select services and go find any services that you aren't using .. ie; telnet, DHCP (if you have static) ..etc etc

 

[xfactordomine]

this should help you with disabling services..

link

-X

 

[BuddyAtBzboyz]

Originally posted by: Bluefront
This is crap....did any of you guys read what he's going to be doing with XP? It doesn't take the newest and fastest to to run well....many people have XP running just fine on relatively low-powered CPUs. That 350 PII will run very well, hell my P-Pro 200 runs perfect with only 128mb ram.

Man you and I have a totally different deffinition of totally well. Do you really consider having to make the operating system run at a bare minimum and still being slow "real well". Heck using win xp on a celeron 1.7 with 128 seems like hell to me.

 

[TheOmegaCode]

Originally posted by: BuddyAtBzboyz

Originally posted by: Bluefront
This is crap....did any of you guys read what he's going to be doing with XP? It doesn't take the newest and fastest to to run well....many people have XP running just fine on relatively low-powered CPUs. That 350 PII will run very well, hell my P-Pro 200 runs perfect with only 128mb ram.

Man you and I have a totally different deffinition of totally well. Do you really consider having to make the operating system run at a bare minimum and still being slow "real well". Heck using win xp on a celeron 1.7 with 128 seems like hell to me.

Heh, exactly. I had XP on a 400Mhz celeron w/ 256MB RAM. It didn't run all that nicely. The OS itself was a resource hog, yet alone any other apps you'd try to run on it. I originally set it up to do what Eug was planning on doing (more or less) do a tiny bit of photoshop editing, running AIM, burning CD's and watching Family guy 😀 Photoshop took forever to open, CD's took forever to burn, and the video was always latent whenever I would try to watch a movie. Now, I'm not saying it ran like crap. I think it ran along like a little champ, if you consider what the recommended minimum hardware is (min. hardware is always slow). I've since turned that little XP box into a robust web/ftp/mp3 streaming server. I just thought you'd like another opinion from someone who's done it before...

 

[smp]

Originally posted by: tdas2

Originally posted by: smp

Originally posted by: tdas2 Its (XP Pro) is fine so long as you have the overheads such as skinning turned off. Then its essentially Windows 2000 pro with a few added features. Infact, just for reliability , once you got your system up and running under Windows XP Pro, system restore becomes pretty handy, one point over windows 2000 pro.

Who needs system restore? I have had system restore since 98; format re-install bingo! System restore 🙂 You're going to be fine dude. A PII350 running XP in classic mode is just like running 2K .. and I run 2K and it runs very well with 256 megs of ram on a PII350, as stated before. Listen to no one but me, I know all.

It is useful when time is of the essense and you dont have time to do a restore- Oh sorry i forgot , you dont work , do you 😀

I do actually but we use RIS here 😛

I played around with the PII350/BX mobo/256 meg ram machine last night and I'll tell ya, it runs fast. For real. Why not install win2K? I'm running it with SP3 on that box and for real, it's really nice, way nicer than I thought it would be. For normal OS operation it compares to my 1.4 gig tbird (talking browsing files, internet stuff etc) ... not sure about photoshop. It runs office nice and smooth too ... I actually love it. Why you need XP for, especially since it's older hardware?

edit: The gigabitch BX mobo that I'm using is amazing.

 

[Eug]

Heh, exactly. I had XP on a 400Mhz celeron w/ 256MB RAM. It didn't run all that nicely. The OS itself was a resource hog, yet alone any other apps you'd try to run on it. I originally set it up to do what Eug was planning on doing (more or less) do a tiny bit of photoshop editing, running AIM, burning CD's and watching Family guy 😀 Photoshop took forever to open, CD's took forever to burn, and the video was always latent whenever I would try to watch a movie. Now, I'm not saying it ran like crap. I think it ran along like a little champ, if you consider what the recommended minimum hardware is (min. hardware is always slow). I've since turned that little XP box into a robust web/ftp/mp3 streaming server. I just thought you'd like another opinion from someone who's done it before...

Hmmmm... That seems strange.

I wonder if the load times might be partially related to the drive. I'm picking up a drive tonite to swap in. I won't be watching movies at all so that's not an issue, but I do remember when I had a 366 Celeron on Win 98 it ran OK for movies, with a Rage Pro, and even when I had a Voodoo 3. (For the latter card I couldn't do even the simplest multitasking though.) As for CDs, at least for Win 2000 16X burns are fine with this Pentium II 350, but I haven't tried 24X yet because I don't trust the media at that speed. Did you have all the eye candy on?

Anyways, it's too late now, XP Pro has already been ordered. The only other option would have been Win 2000, since I won't use ME or 98. Or else I would have gotten a brand new eMac.

Thanks for the services info by the way people. I'll tell ya how it goes - still waiting for the OS to arrive.

 

[smp]

Originally posted by: BuddyAtBzboyz

Originally posted by: Bluefront This is crap....did any of you guys read what he's going to be doing with XP? It doesn't take the newest and fastest to to run well....many people have XP running just fine on relatively low-powered CPUs. That 350 PII will run very well, hell my P-Pro 200 runs perfect with only 128mb ram.

Man you and I have a totally different deffinition of totally well. Do you really consider having to make the operating system run at a bare minimum and still being slow "real well". Heck using win xp on a celeron 1.7 with 128 seems like hell to me.

There's your problem right there .. I bet that it would run better on his machine with 256 ... 😎

 

[matheusber]

Originally posted by: Eug

Originally posted by: singh
You should be OK 🙂

Thanks. Normally I'd agree wholeheartedly, but the Photoshop 5 LE business has got me wondering. (Even though the image editing will be light, the images are 4 Megapixels.) Hmmmm...

matheus