XP... on 128mb?

[Cruise51]

A friend of mine just installed windows xp on his system but it only has 128mb of ram and is running very slow. What are some ways to free up some ram? He has tried switching to the classic interface but hasn't noticed much of a difference.

 

[Stumps]

ummm uninstall WinXP..or Upgrade to 256mb+, WinXP on a 128mb system is a woeful experience.

 

[Noema]

Don't even THINK about running XP with less than 256MB. No matter what you do, it will be sluggish, because it will have to start swapping right from the moment you boot. Even a fresh install of XP (no 3rd party drivers, no codecs, no programs except the essential stuff loading up on boot) will take 100MB+ of RAM right after the screen pops up.

256MB is the bare minimum.

Try Windows 2000. Or better yet: a light Linux distro like Xubuntu or Damn Small Linux. I've tried the latter on a 1.4GHz P4 with 128MB of RAM and it runs perfectly.

 

[akshayt]

Do one thing. Format the HDD. Reinstall CP but don't install SP2, install the orignal version or SP1, that will run faster.
For SP2, 256mb is the bare minimum and 512mb is strongly recommended.

Now don't tell us that he is on a P4/Athlon XP system.

 

[imported_LoKe]

My old 126MB/933MHZ box is running Windows XP just fine.

 

[akshayt]

Is that XP SP2?

Must be running slow.

 

[Cruise51]

I'm not 100% sure but I think it's an old Athlon T-bird. I have a stick of 64mb I think I might give him, hopefully that will help a little. Is there any other things I can do, besides adding more ram?

 

[techmanc]

XP out of the box might squeak by with 128mb of ram. But if you have installed alot of programs esp apps like office and virus programs that eating up the little memory you have and will start using the pagefile alot more which is slowing the system down

 

[imported_LoKe]

Originally posted by: akshayt
Is that XP SP2?

Must be running slow.

I don't recall updating it to SP2, and my parents wouldn't know how, so probably not. Plus, they only use Firefox and MSN.

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: Cruise51
I'm not 100% sure but I think it's an old Athlon T-bird. I have a stick of 64mb I think I might give him, hopefully that will help a little.

I used to have a PIII with 192MB of RAM with XPSP2 at work and it was usable. Not too pleasant, not particularly thrilling, but I was able to browse the net and get stuff done in Word.

Is there any other things I can do, besides adding more ram?

Use the Linux distros I linked :evil:

 

[imported_LoKe]

Once it boots up and you give it a few minutes, it gets usable.

 

[postmortemIA]

256MB is not enough for more than one application running.

 

[Cruise51]

Originally posted by: Noema

Originally posted by: Cruise51
I'm not 100% sure but I think it's an old Athlon T-bird. I have a stick of 64mb I think I might give him, hopefully that will help a little.

I used to have a PIII with 192MB of RAM with XPSP2 at work and it was usable. Not too pleasant, not particularly thrilling, but I was able to browse the net and get stuff done in Word.

Is there any other things I can do, besides adding more ram?

Use the Linux distros I linked :evil:

He has only used windows and is far from techno savy, so linux might be a little too much for him to handle.

 

[InlineFive]

akshayt, please stop spreading this FUD about SP2 slowing a computer down. It includes many valuable security upgrades and the 0.00002% you KNOW you must be losing in performance makes it worthwhile.

To be honest I have never noticed a difference between SP1 and SP2 on many systems.

 

[Vegitto]

Get TinyXP. If your friend has a legal version of Windows XP, there's nothing wrong with it. Idling, it used 32 MB over here.

 

[akshayt]

SP2 is a lot slower, I have used it on a medicore pc and it works crap

 

[Aluvus]

Originally posted by: akshayt
SP2 is a lot slower, I have used it on a medicore pc and it works crap

I have used Windows XP with both SP1 and SP2 on several older systems, and never been able to detect even a tiny performance difference.

SP2 is a lot safer.

 

[Stumps]

Don't listen to Akshayt, he's knows jackshit about what he is talking about.

I have used SP2 on slow PC's(550mhz K6-3's) and it works fine with 256mb.

It would really matter what service pack you have if you only have 128mb ram, WinXP is a ram hungry bitch, you really need a minimum of 256mb before it becomes useable.

Maybe stepping back to Win2K(if availible) might be a better option, it works reasonably well with only 128mb.

 

[jazzboy]

128 MB RAM on XP will be OK, not brilliant. But turning off background and the blue & green fisher price look will knock off nearbly 10MB of memory usage straight away.

Also turning off services which you know you don't need helps a lot too - especially junk like remote registry and windows time.

At the end of the day it kind of depends more on the actual software you use. After all the typical software that people use nowadays, like office, firefox, msn messenger, antivirus etc. has much higher memory requirement than the versions used 5 years ago when XP first came out.

 

[Maximilian]

Up the ram for sure, the CPU isnt as important as the RAM is with XP, i got it running on a PII 333mhz and it was snappier than a 1.4ghz PIII celeron lappy as the lappy had 128mb of ram and the PII had 512mb.

I know you can screw around with the processes, switch some off etc in administritive tools > services. But i doubt you can lessen XP's ram useage enough to make it speedier and still have a functional OS after turning off a ton of the services. Havent looked into it in a while.

 

[networkman]

OP doesn't say, but perhaps the system running XP with 128meg is using shared video memory - if so, going into the Bios and reducing the amount would free up ram for the system. Just a thought...