Will a P200 work for a small home File/Print Server?

[Blayze]

I have an old P200 system here and I was thinking about putting a hard drive in it (40 gig +) connected to a ATA133 PCI card.

It only has 64 ram in it but the board will support 128 so I will increase the ram.

I was thinking of running Windows 2000 on it and it will be a file server for 2 to 3 machines in my home. Also Im going to use it for a print server. This is all the machine will do.

Will this work? Or will it be to slow?

I don't want to spend a lot of money on this so I would like to use this machine if it will work.

 

[justalink]

I beleive you'll be o.k.

You'll definitely want to upgrate your ram. PC133 is dirt cheap and Windows 2000 will eat your 64meg for lunch.

Check out memory prices on pricewatch.com.

 

[BurnItDwn]

p200 is fine for print and file server. Up it to at least 96Mb of ram to run 2k on it.

 

[Superwormy]

You can squeeze Windows NT down to taking up only like 28ish mb of RAM, it'll be faster than 2k too.

 

[PELarson]

Have you considered Linux? Inexpensive and will do the same job as Windows 2000.

 

[yakkowarner]

Originally posted by: PELarson
Have you considered Linux? Inexpensive and will do the same job as Windows 2000.

True. Assuming you're above-board (and "was thinking of running Windows 2000" makes me think you don't already have a copy lying around waiting to be installed on the system), that's one good way to save money. You also get an OS that works more nicely with the smaller hardware.

Also, do you already have this ATA133 card? You could probably save a few bucks (maybe not anything big) by using ATA100 instead. 133 sounds nice but tends not to make a difference in reality, as reflected by the (small) number of drives now made that bother with it.