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What's the minimum system you would install W2K on?

BlueWeasel

BlueWeasel

Lifer
I have a friend who has the following:

P2 400mhz
256mb RAM
8gb HD

He wants W2K, but I am reluctant to install it because I am afraid it will just be too slow. He is running NT4.0 now and it works great, but no USB support. I know W98 is the first alternative, but he uses this system for CAD and engineering related work, and the instability of W98 is why we went to NT in the first place.

The 256mb RAM is sufficient, but the 400mhz processor is near the minimum specs for W2K.
 
A 400 should work fine.

He may want to up the Ram to 512 to get better performance with
the CAD program.

Performance will also depend on the video card he is using.
 
honestly if someone gave me a computer and for some reason i was forced to install windows on it, i'd use win2k all the way down to a p100 or so. i can deal with sluggishness, its better than the crap that 98 et all make you deal with (UNEXPLAINED ERROR!! SYSTEM MUST BE REBOOTED!!). just stock up on ram 😉
 
I have Win2K installed on a couple Pentium 233 MMX machines, and they both run fine for light usage like internet and email. (They were crunching numbers for RC5, but now I have to find a new project for them.) One has 64 MB RAM and the other has 128 MB. Make sure that you disable as many services as possible and go light on the eye candy like window animations and you'll be doing great with the rig you're working on. The P2 400 should be a pretty solid Win2K box.
 
I have W2k on a dual P-133, 128 meg ram, crunching Seti and running SetiQ, and it gets the job done (Not exactly blazingly fast tho 😀 )
 
Originally posted by: BlueWeasel
I have a friend who has the following:

P2 400mhz
256mb RAM
8gb HD

He wants W2K, but I am reluctant to install it because I am afraid it will just be too slow. He is running NT4.0 now and it works great, but no USB support. I know W98 is the first alternative, but he uses this system for CAD and engineering related work, and the instability of W98 is why we went to NT in the first place.

The 256mb RAM is sufficient, but the 400mhz processor is near the minimum specs for W2K.
Click to expand...

Dude, do you remember what hardware was available when Win2k was first released? Obviously not....
 
Originally posted by: Jugernot
Originally posted by: BlueWeasel
I have a friend who has the following:

P2 400mhz
256mb RAM
8gb HD

He wants W2K, but I am reluctant to install it because I am afraid it will just be too slow. He is running NT4.0 now and it works great, but no USB support. I know W98 is the first alternative, but he uses this system for CAD and engineering related work, and the instability of W98 is why we went to NT in the first place.

The 256mb RAM is sufficient, but the 400mhz processor is near the minimum specs for W2K.
Click to expand...

Dude, do you remember what hardware was available when Win2k was first released? Obviously not....
Click to expand...

Uhhh...Dude....the above system was built and purchased a few years before W2K was even released. You make it sound like a P2 400mhz was a gnarly system in 2000.

 
We have a whole load of P2-400 MHz boxes around here, all running Win2K, working fine.
As long as you have at least 128 MB of RAM you're fine, anything below 128 will REALLY slow things down though.
 
I ran it on a Dual PPro 200 with 96MB of ram before ... If it had more Ram it would have actually been pretty decent
 
that system will run it fine

i ran w2k pro to do ICS on the following system (but it was doggy slow, i wouldn't actually do this on a pc a human was going to use)

Pentium 166
64MB
2GB hard drive
two modems
 
I use to run win2k on a PII 233 with 128MB ram. Ran ok.
Upgraded to 256MB ram. Ran perfectly.

Now running it on a PII 400 with 512MB ram, runs perfectly aswell.
 
Yeah it'll run fine, i got 2k on my celeron 533.

But looking back also it doesn't seem like my p2 300 can cope with even win 98! I swear they're getting slower!
 
I had to run my Win98se/W2K SP2 dual-boot installation on a backup system for a while, it was a Pentium 100Mhz with 256MB of RAM. W2K ran fine on that system. The only thing really too slow on it, was Mozilla. Also, at one point, there was some sort of CMOS settings issue, and W2K thought it only had 64MB of RAM. It swapped a lot more than with 256MB, but I never saw any futher decrease in applications performance because of it. I would say that a P-100 with 64MB of RAM is probably the absolute minimum for W2K, maybe even as low as a P-75. Don't expect to use that system for anything serious though, certainly not games or mp3s or divx movies, and maybe not even Mozilla.

 
I actually have a 200Mhz Pentium w/ 32MB RAM running win2k. Granted, I put 2k on it and made sure everything was working and I use it as a print server. It sits in the guest bedroom closet with no monitor/mouse/speakers/keyboard hooked up but she runs great for print serving. I actually played with it a little bit before I sent it to the closet, and it was a little slow, but would be tolerable if you weren't doing anything too serious on it.

As far as your CAD friend goes, he should be in good shape. Maybe a little RAM upgrade would help that CAD stuff move along, but other than that he ought to be good to go!

-Jeff
 
I've seen XP running on a system with the same processor and memory, and it seemed OK to me, so I'm sure Win2K would also run OK.
 
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