Which OS for a p166 mmx?

[Lowfat]

I'm putting together a 166 mmx, 96 mb ram, 3 gig HD, cdrom, winfast 1mb, yah, that's about it. Which OS would you recomend for that? Win98se is most stable, put I recond the performance would be too slow. Win95? Gee, hope not. Seem to remember the dreadfull blusecreen. The machine will be put to use for simple text writing, email, surfing.

 

[Shack70]

I would go with 98SE myslef. If you are just doing simple text writing, email, surfing...look into Linux! It make be the best alternative for older machines that don't need to play games!

 

[0div0]

Linux or BeOS. BeOS is a breeze to set up and very similar to windows.

 

[Lowfat]

I don't want to go into linux. The person whom will be using the computer is not familiar with anything besides windows. BeOS sounds interesting, however the personal edition seems to have major limitations. I really don't want to , gosh, buy BeOS proffesional ;-) . I might be wrong though.

 

[Tired of the Bull]

LINUX or BEOS would work if your comfortable going that route. (Fastest performance) If not I would personally use WIN95B or even 95C if you can get your hands on it. I think the stability is as good or better than 98SE and the overhead is less.

 

[Changlinn]

I am sue you can find a warez version of beos, even thou I was impressed enough to buy it. It installs a breeze, burns easier than windows looks a little too much like mac for some people. But is a as stable as an ox, it runs every program in a virtual operating system, if the program "crashes" it crashes the virtual os and you just restart the program. But it has I believe the user friendliness of mac and the ability to get into the nity grity like linux as it has a nice command promp that is unix based.

 

[ledzepp98]

i would go with win98se. for comparison, my friend at college was getting by with a p166 (which i oc'd to 200 ), 48megs ram, cd-rom, probably a sb16, cheap nic, roughly 2gig drive, i'm not sure about the video but it was less than 4megs because i couldn't run 3dmark2k on it (it was probably 2megs), etc... he used it for word, access, internet, etc... it was not fast but it got by just fine.

 

[Workin']

I wouldn't use anything but 98SE on that machine. 98SE doesn't put any more of a demand on the system than 95a,b,c etc. You will be doing the person you are setting up a big favor by using 98 instead of one of the older versions.

 

[ldentityCrisis]

BeOS is the way to go. Definitely worth $40 for basic internet usage. Better memory management as well.
Windows is easy enough for anyone to learn...if he's not familiar with ANY OS then do him a favor and let him start out with something other than Microsoft.
In a year or so he may be able to teach YOU some things.

 

[Lowfat]

I assure you, I will not pay $40 for BeOS. I think I'll try win98se and see how it goes. As for the person, it's my girlfriend and I'm living with her, so I'll definitly hear it if it doesn't work satisfactory ;->

 

[Mooncalf]

I've got SE on a 120 it works fine, slow, but fine.

 

[goldboyd]

95b should be noticably faster, and just as, if not more, stable than 98se

 

[CocaCola5]

You could run w2k if you want to. I ran it on my older P133 80mb 1.5G hdd system. If you're comfortable with partition and tweaking, w2k could run just as fast as 98 I think. You can speed it up by playing with the swap partition and even a part. for IE temp folder. I had a swap part. 100mb, main system part of 700mb(about the smallest install partition 2k allows). I also had a second 1G hdd with another 100mb swap part.. Even on a slower machine, w2k will be faster than even win95(I've tried all from 95,98 to NT4.0 to 2k on this system) at some things like file saving tasks, for ex. saving a large web page was like three times faster on 2k than on 95, maybe its 2k's more efficient memory management. I also trimmed just about everything from the OS for max. perf. like disabling memory dump, script debugging and others, had tweakui, so its is possible to make a decent 2k machine on older hardware.

 

[Emory7]

Another vote for 98SE. I've got it running on a Pentium 100 with no problems. I did install more mememory, now has 64 megs.

 

[mylam]

not for win2000...that will be super slow...not enough cpu power and ram also

 

[slag]

Any flavor of Windows 95 (b or c) will be much less sluggish than windows 98/se and will appear and feel noticeably faster and snappier on your computer.

 

[CocaCola5]

For those that think 2k is too slow on a P1, please tell me what system are you using for w2k, and have you even bother to try running 2k on a older system? The fact is, his system will run just fine on 2k, I should know because I have 2k on a P133 with 80meg ram. I also have 2k on a duron 700 at 950 and 512meg ram. I have installed 95,98,NT4.0, 2k on my P1 and the choice for me by far is 2k. There are things I've notice that Windows2000 can do much faster than even windows95 no matter if the system is only a P1. File manipulations like, copy and paste, save and delete for example is much faster under 2k(with NTFS).

 

[nateholtrop]

linux slackware 7.1

nate

 

[Priit]

CocaCola5: I've tried W2k on a 486 and it was about 5-10+ times slower overall than W95. Even K6/200 with 64Mb of RAM was dog slow and I replaced it with NT4 later...

I think W95 OSR2 is the way to go for P166, it's much faster than W98/SE/NT on that hardware configuration...

 

[Lowfat]

Thanks for the input guys. It seems like I've messed up. After a recount yesterday, it turns out I only got 24 MEGs of RAM. Damn! Now what? Do you think win98se can run on this?

 

[Priit]

W98SE needs 32Mb RAM minimum and runs more-less decently with 64Mb. Don't even bother to try it with 24Mb of RAM, take W95 or linux.

 

[Mooncalf]

I agree with Priit, don't bother with '98 with so little memory.

Edit- On second thought, the P120 with SE I have has 40MB and it works well so maybe it won't be that different with 24MB. It has only crashed 3 times in about a year, granted it isn't used for anything but the internet and RCT.

Edit #2 Like the sig Lowfat. I type like that except I still can only manage 30 WPM.

 

[Workin']

I had a P90 with 24MB RAM and 98SE was much more satisfying on it than 95a or OSR2.

 

[anton]

Did you think about Win NT 4.0 , I had on P166 with 64mb ram , and it was veeery stable ; ) ... and not slow at all

 

[Drekce]

I have a Pentium 60 with 24 MB of RAM running win 98SE. It is slow as would be expected, but no slower than when 95 was on it. Go with 98SE