Windows XP on older machine

[PCDumbass]

I'm trying to install Windows XP Pro on an older Celeron 366 with 128MB of RAM.

It's working reasonably well, even the actual install itself is fairly quick via the XP CD, but once I have it fully installed and try to install additional programs (like Office 2k), the CD-ROM just bugs out.

It's recognized under "My Computer" perfectly well, but it is really slow to allow me to "Open" or "Explore" any CD's contents. I have tried 4 different CD-ROM's on the system now (which all work fine to actually install Windows XP on the system, go figure) and they all give me the same problem. I have not yet tried to install SP2 because I just want to get the basic functions to work first.

Has anybody else encountered this problem? Is there a setting or patch to help out, or should I just abort now and realize that the PC is too slow to run XP?

I think that the PC can handle XP since it installs so well, there's just some inconsistency once XP loads.

-Rob
robpilgrim@gmail.com

 

[FlyingPenguin]

System does not meet the minimum requirements for WinXP (500 MHz) and 128Mb is below MY personal memory requirement. Pointless installing XP on anything less than 256Mb. The OS by itself in a clean install uses 110Mb with no anti-virus. You'll be using virtual memory all the time.

You're probably seeing slowdowns related to virtual memory caching.

Open Task Manager and go to the performance tab. If the Total Commit Charge is larger than the Total Physical Memory (which I'm sure it is) that's your problem. You never want to exceed Total Physical Memory.

You need another 128Mb stick in there. You also need to disable EVERY NON-ESSENTIAL background service. Turn off System Restore, disable the Indexing Service (to a google search for the proper procedure - you don't just turn off the service), disable the Themes service and a bunch of others I can't think of right now but a google search would tell you.

Or beter yet install Windows 2000 (which is really WinXP without all the aforementioned services and bloat anyway). Win2K will run very nicely on the that system even with only 128Mb (although more would be better).

 

[PCDumbass]

Hey, great post, very helpful.

I do not have much experience with Win 2000, so that's why I prefer to stick with XP if I can. It just needs to run one little program, so I'd like to get to work if I can. I know the processor speed is painfully slow, but I have installed XP on slower (CPU wise, not RAM-wise) systems and it has worked for me.

Your RAM explanation seems like it hits the nail right on the head. The thing appears to work fine up until XP is fully loaded, then things take a turn for the worse. I will try and disable a lot of the non-essential services in an effort to lighten the heavy RAM requirement that XP creates. I will also add-in another 128MB of RAM to see if that helps.

Cheers,

-Rob

 

[sykopath79]

Windows 2000 is not substantially different from WinXP in terms of user interface. If you're familiar with WinXP, you'll feel right at home in Win2k. And your machine will run a ton better.

 

[RJR2006]

Windows XP is based on 2k technology, and XP has a modified NT code for home users to have the ability to run games and some 9x programs.

 

[PCDumbass]

XP seems to be running fine right now... I stripped it down considerably and now it even runs Word and Excel without any trouble.

After checking the system resources, it appears that the PC has 160MB of RAM - which is a little better - and it was using about 90MB to run XP, with 70MB to spare for applications.

The reason I opted to go with XP is for the end user. I have no idea if it will work for the long term or not, but for now it's stable.

The CD-ROM use is still very sketchy though. It reads sometimes, but not others. Does the initial "reading" or "recognizing" of a CD require a fair amount of RAM?

-Rob

 

[BadThad]

No offense, but you're nutz man. No way I'd run XP on anything less than a 1GHz CPU and 512MB ram. I've repaired PC's running XP with lesser configurations and IT IS PAINFUL.

The CDROM doesn't really use system ram, but it will use CPU. With the CPU demands of XP, there's probably very little cycles left for anything else on that system. At least go thru and disable every non-essential service. Not going to help much, after you load a firewall, anti-virus and anti-malware software on that PC it's going to bring it to it's knee's. GOOD LUCK

 

[FlyingPenguin]

CD-Rom may just need the lens cleans. You have a lens cleaning disc lying around?

It's an annoying problem with windows that while the CD-Rom is recognizing a newly inserted disc, the whole system and any open Explorer windows, will hang until it's done. Even happens on new fast systems, you just don't notice it as much.

 

[PCDumbass]

After installing another 128MB of RAM for a total of ~300MB and now the PC seems to be running fine. I did strip it down to be as barebones as possible and that seems to have helped considerably as the CD-ROM is now working well.

I know you all think I'm crazy to try it, but it really does seem OK... it runs Word or Excel well and it seems to work fine as a stand-alone PC that will be used to run just a "home insurance & inspection" program.

I'll keep you posted as to how it turns out, but thanks for all of your comments and suggestions.

-Rob

 

[CrispyFried]

Check in the device manager and make sure its not in PIO mode, xp will switch to that if it has problems reading CDs. If it is, delete that channel and let XP redetect it to get it back in dma2 mode.