What can run in a Pentium 166 "no MMX" 32Mb RAM ?

[CamisaAmarela]

No jokes, please ! I know that its a Museum piece, maybe NASA
would be interested in purchase some parts of it but I want to know what
Windows OS (plus Office) could be installed on it and run stable.
No Linux. The performance (naturally) is not a concern.

Thanks in advance...

 

[LiLithTecH]

Go with Microsoft Windows 98SE

 

[DnetMHZ]

yes 95/98/98se...whichever you have will work fine

 

[Nothinman]

If performance isn't a concen put whatever you want on it. I believe when you buy a license for Windows it's backwards compatible, meaning if you buy NT 5.1 you can still run NT 5 or NT 4, not sure if it applies to Win9X though because I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

I personally would run NT 4 if it had to be a workstation, there's no reason to subject yourself to Win9X (besides you wanted stable) and if you ever get another decent machine on it the Win2K or XP license can be use to install Win2K or XP on it if you want.

 

[dbwillis]

I seconds Windows NT4 workstation, it was pretty snappy for me on a 48mb 133mhz box (NT4 Server)

 

[LiLithTecH]

NT 4 Snappy with 48mb?

It takes 48 mb just to fire-up the kernel.

 

[singh]

NT 4 or Win95.

 

[Nothinman]

We have a good bit of P133/166 boxes where I work running NT 4 with 32M of memory. Snappy may not be the right word, but it's definately usable and with 32M nothing with a GUI will be snappy.

 

[ProviaFan]

Stay away from the Windows 9x/ME series if at all possible. NT4 and Office 97 would probably make a good combination. Office 2000 would probably install on it, but it would probably be terribly slow.

 

[thornc]

Yap, you best bet would be NT4SP6 (perhaps even with SR1) + IE5.01SP2 + (ALL NEW PATCHS) and Office 97 +SR1+SR2+PATCHS...

I had a fried of mine working on a P133 with 64MB with the above setup without any problems...'till the day the board died on him
and he changed setup!

 

[tigerwannabe]

NT4 workstation gets my vote, too. i have to disagree with LiLithTecH, though. i can run a minimal install of NT4 workstation on a pentium 75 with 16MB of RAM, along with 2 client/server apps. believe it or not, performance is acceptable.

 

[dbwillis]

Well, maybe snappy wasnt the right word, it wasnt ungodly slow, it was fairly responsive when I used it, think the mem useage was around 27/28mb, I only had SP6, Apache 2, Nav7CE, IE5 running on it at the time

 

[MedicBob]

Linux.

 

[civad]

NT4...or Win 95.

May the age of the OS match the age of the PC....

 

[Nothinman]

May the age of the OS match the age of the PC....

God no, then I'd have to install >5 year old versions of Linux on my UltraSparc 1 and Alpha PWS600au. The current versions run just fine, thank you very much.

 

[civad]

Should have been a lil more specific:

May the age of the WIndows OS match the age of the PC.

-->Note the use of the word "match". It does not necessarily mean "be equal to"....

 

[Amused]

I'd use 98SE with all updates. Beyond having to reboot once a day (most people do this anyhow by shutting it down at night) 98SE was pretty stable for me.

I never had it crash by simply running Office programs or IE.

No jokes here. One of my neices is using an old P150, 48MB machine of mine to surf the net and do school work. It's slow, but it does what she needs. It keeps the peace in their house too --everyone used to fight over the family computer.

 

[CamisaAmarela]

(...)
No jokes here. One of my neices is using an old P150, 48MB machine of mine to surf the net and do school work. It's slow, but it does what she needs. It keeps the peace in their house too --everyone used to fight over the family computer.

That's exactly my case : it's for a niece and she needs it for web surfing and school stuff. Yesterday, I discoverd that my brother has an unused Win98SE midia. I'll try the 98SE this weekend.

Thank you very much to all !