suitable OS for P200mmx?

[MOgeeks]

I am an old PC with the following specs:

Intel P200MMX or Cyrix PR200
64mb EDO DIMM ram or 256mb SDRAM
10GB harddisk 5400rpm or 1.7GB 4500rpm

(only one motherboard and the one of the hard drive need to be used in another PC)

I am considering installing Mandrake 8.0 or win2k since it meet the minimum requirement for both OS.

On the other hand, I felt the system may be too slow for either OS

Does anyone have suggestion or have experiences using win2k or Mandrake 8.0 w/ a similar or slower system?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Tol]

I used to use win2k on a P166 with 48MB ram and an old 2GB harddrive. It ran well enough, but it's definitely better now with win98.

 

[manly]

W2K will run like sh1t on that box. And WNT 4.0 is sh1t.

Debian Linux would be a good choice for an older machine because it is a lightweight Linux distro. From what other forum members have said, an install will be as small as 80 MB. n0cmonkey would probably recommend OpenBSD.

If you want a mainstream Linux distro, pick an oldie (but goodie) like Red Hat 6.2 or SuSE Linux 7.0.

The most reasonable Winblows OS for that box would be W98SE.

 

[n0cmonkey]

I used to run FreeBSD on a Compaq Presario laptop with a cyrix 233. It was damn fast, except for disk access

X was a little slow, but who needs it? That machine would make a decent little file server, especially if you picked up a new hard drive or two

 

[Priit]

Win95 (OSR2) if you want Microsoft. Win98SE feels painfully slow compared to it on P166 with 256Mb RAM.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

any linux distro or BSD would probably be ok. i'm pretty sure you can do a < 100MB install with mandrake. just because it's mandrake doesnt mean you're stuck with X and KDE and all that crap.

i recommend debian it'll run great on your old POS or your 2Ghz SMP box with 1GB ram and 15k scsi drives

 

[KiwiSurfer]

Well, I had a p166mmx with 32megs EDO ram for five years (until rectently), so this is my experience:

Windows 95 runs well on systems like that -- it's very fast and reasonably stable (not as stable as 2000 tho). Win98 could be ok, but I personally wouldn't use it, since Windows 95 does the job without the needless bloat that Windows 98 has.

A mate of mine has Windows 2000 on a p200 with 128MB ram (SDRAM I think), and it was quite slow. Even Windows 95 on my 32megs was faster. Unless you really want the security benefits and stablility that Windows 2000 offers, just stick with Windows 95 or BSD.

FreeBSD with XFree86 3.3.6 with KDE 2.2.2 was kinda slow, but if you have 64megs of ram (as opposed to the 32megs I had) the peformance would probally be better since there would be a lot less disk swapping.

- James

 

[robisc]

Try BeOS 5

 

[Iron Woode]

I have win98se on a P166 with 80megs of ram and its pretty fast. Doing a minimum install on the 2gig drive, win98se takes up 300 megs of space.

For a DOS based OS I would use win98se.

 

[Sunner]

The only Windows OS I'd throw on a box like that would be Win95 OSR 2.x.
The NT based Windowses would be a no-go.

Aside from that, Linux or a BSD would work nicely.

 

[nuttervm]

the real question here is what do you want to do with the box? web browsing and email reading, or a small server? if you want a server OS on it, bsd is your best bet. I prefer openbsd, but freebsd is a little more user-friendly. if you want some web-browsing, just slap win95 on there.

 

[rip22]

Im running a small tweaked webserver 24/7 on a 166mhz win95osr2 48mb ram with Apache webserver works as a charm

 

[MOgeeks]

Thank all for the input.

My intention is to have a backup computer cum small server.
Not considering win95 because I don't have it.
As for win98, I am already using that and hoping for a change.

After reading all the above input, seem like linux with older kernel will be good for its speed. I will probably need to dig some old linux out.

Win2k will be drop from my list. Seem no reason to spend 2 hrs to install and then find out that it will take half an hour to boot in everytime:Q

Any other OS recommendation?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

<< Im running a small tweaked webserver 24/7 on a 166mhz win95osr2 48mb ram with Apache webserver works as a charm >>


um.....why?

 

[n0cmonkey]

<<

<< Im running a small tweaked webserver 24/7 on a 166mhz win95osr2 48mb ram with Apache webserver works as a charm >>


um.....why? >>



masochism

 

[TheOmegaCode]

<<

<< Im running a small tweaked webserver 24/7 on a 166mhz win95osr2 48mb ram with Apache webserver works as a charm >>


um.....why? >>


Serious... what? do you get two hits, and it crashes?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

either he is a masochist or he has a really good sense of humor

 

[TheOmegaCode]

<< Im running a small tweaked webserver 24/7 on a 166mhz win95osr2 48mb ram with Apache webserver works as a charm >>


and how is it tweaked?

 

[rip22]

In reply to:
--------------------------
um.....why?
masochism?
Serious... what? do you get two hits, and it crashes?
either he is a masochist or he has a really good sense of humor :tounge:
and how is it tweaked?
--------------------------

Well it started more as a experiment i wanted to see if it would work ok. its just a small homesite running on it. with a few hits/day thats why i wrote a 'small webserver' in my post. What suprised me was the fact that i don't need to reboot or anything no crashes, but then again it only gets a few hits/day.

Not knowing what MOgeeks wanted to do with his mmx200 and considring that he already got good options in the replys from you guys. I just wanted to add another option since i got a box running like that. :Q

 

[LoTecha]

I recently built a cheap (read: free) system for a friend out of the following parts:

p200mmx (o/c'd 233)
64mb sdram
5400hd
matrox millenium II

I put Win2k on it and it runs very nicely. All she does is websurf, office apps, and a few educational programs, and she's had no problems whatsoever. When I was testing it out, I did some basic office tasks on it and I had no complaints. I don't know if Win95/98 would have run faster on it, but Win2k was definitely fine.

Just to let you know though, after a clean boot, there's only around 10-15megs of free physical ram. Enough for your basic tasks, but obviously, not enough for running memory-intensive programs.