Will an old compaq pentium 1 run windows xp?

[Kenazo]

You said "This computer doesn't have ethernet" I presumed you were talking about the laptop, thus why I suggested putting a PCMCIA NIC in it. (NIC = ethernet card) THen you can just plug into the laptop using a network cable and away you go.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Go with 2000, XP is slow on a 1Ghz machine, so imagine one under a Ghz

XP requires a few Gigs of HDD space and about 192MB of ram, I think so no way it's going on a slow machine... well it can, but it won't be smooth. I managed to get 98 on a 486 once, it worked, but it took 10 minutes for it to respond to any mouse action such as opening a window or moving one.

 

[vegetation]

I have win2k on a P-133 (overclocked to 166) , with 64MB and a modern 80gb hard drive. Runs pretty sweet, though all I do is run IE and an Apache webserver for low volume use. Note this is a desktop though. Laptops of that era were a lot slower. Even the 2d performance on those old laptop video cards are horribly slow.

 

[touchmyichi]

I agree with vegetation, i've seen 2k run on some pretty old systems pretty decently. The special effects and included extras of XP is what is really going to kill you and take up way too much of your resources.

 

[magomago]

run 20kpro @ a 233mhz P1 with 64 megs of ram and a 4 gig hdd at home. I stuck it on there for my parents when i upgrades to winxp at the time. for just regular net usage, its perfectly fine

and considering all you will do...i think you'll be fine. if you want to try that with winXP though, i would reccomend to make sure to turn off ALL things that are not needed and any special effects...

 

[xgsound]

I believe the oldest OS to properly support USB and the mass storage (camera) drivers is win98se with rollups at http://exuberant.ms11.net/98sesp.html .

I suggest you use a USB card reader ($20?) to xfer the camera files to the laptop. Just be sure it supports your camera's card type. This will eliminate additional software. The card reader can then be used to as a thumb drive to xfer the files to your main machine one full card at a time. Of course, if you have a thumb drive, use that to xfer the pics from laptop to home machine. When you're done, you have a card reader for your home machine.

In case you don't know, Ifranview is an excellent and efficient free photo viewer that should work as well as anything on an older machine.

If this all falls through somehow, you can still go to a Kinkos, Walmart, or a computer store and get the card xfered to CD.


Jim

Edit: I just noticed the OP is from June. Sorry guys.

 

[The Linuxator]

OK I got your solution right here, the card reader that the guy suggested is a good idea , get that and get yourself a very light Linux distro and you should be set, maybe you can considre a very light distro such as DSL which is only a 50 mb, it comes with firefox, a program like notepad, and xmms-mp3 player and some very basic but necessary applications, incase the cardreader works with DSL ( most probably it will if not there is always a way to add that support ask some linux GURU 's around here for that) you should be ok and ready to go . link to dsl : http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=damnsmall
hope this helps