Lowest pit of hell

[Mercutio]

One of the PCs I built this weekend was for someone who described their Dell as "too slow".

It's too slow alright. It's a Pentium 233 with 32MB of RAM and a 3GB hard disk, partitioned as 2 1.5GB FAT drives which is completely and utterly full (I take that back. It has 16k free on the second partition). It has XP on it.

This isn't so much a tech support thing, but...

Can anyone with more knowledge than me about XP explain how the hell this box manages to run???

How slow is it? Well, in after the boot-time virus scan (from NAV that hasn't been updated since 1999), it takes about 25 minutes to get to an empty desktop, and approximately 5 minutes to navigate to Add/Remove Programs.

Utterly amazing.

 

[Mercutio]

Oh. And I forgot to mention: Some intelligent person has handily configured 64MB swap files on both partitions of the hard disk. Yup. That's amazingly helpful.

 

[Buck]

Ghost or image a copy of another drive in a special HDD copying system (which has more memory). Then put the drive into the system Dell machine. XP will run with such little memory, but it won't install on that type of system. I've done this with other versions of Windows.

 

[Buck]

Oh. And I forgot to mention: Some intelligent person has handily configured 64MB swap files on both partitions of the hard disk. Yup. That's amazingly helpful.

No way! :eekers:

 

[Mercutio]

Wow. I feel special. Someone made it annoyingly difficult, just for me.

 

[Tea]

Zeriouz viruz infection, Zir. Very zorry, nazty bug, nothing elze we can do.

gdisk /batch
GDISK> 1 /del /all
GDISK> 1 /cre /pri /-32 /for /q
GDISK> 1 /cre /ext
GDISK> 1 /cre /log /for /q

(reboot)

A:> sys c:
A:> idein

(reboot)

C:> e:
E:> setup

$45 dollarz thankz.

 

[Buck]

It was supposed to go here not here!

 

[blakerwry]

Merc, working for an ISP that was doing some on-site work for a customer.. one of the PC's they had was slow.. and they warned us beforehand.... we turned the thing on and it was taking forever... so we went accross the street to get some food.. came back.. still booting over 1/2 hour later.

it was a 486 with ~8MB RAM... dunna remember anything else.

I'm not surprised that a MMX can run winXP with 32MB RAM... infact i wouldn't doubt if you can run it on any 32bit x86 w/ a math coprocessor and 32MB RAM (ie 486DX 33mHz). You can certainly run any other windows OS under those conditions.

 

[jtr1962]

Honestly, I'm amazed that anyone would even try to run XP on such a machine. That must be painful. On the other hand, Win98 or 95 will run quite snappily on such a machine if you don't have anything running in the background. However, 32 MB pretty much limits your choice of software. Incidentally, that box I found runs Win98 just fine with 32 MB and an old 2GB HDD for what I'm currently doing with it(using it to test NYC Taxicam controllers after I repair them). It only takes about 40 seconds to boot. I upgraded the processor from a 166 Pentium to a 200 MHz MMX. I got a pair of them on EBay for $13.99, heatsinks included. The other one went in my mother's Pentium 100 machine. Nowadays, a 200 MMX is still a very useful machine, provided you don't bog it down with software designed for much faster systems.

I guess if you live long enough sooner or later you'll see everything. An acquaintance of mine once tried to install Win98 on a 286 with 4 MB of RAM. It took me an hour to explain why it would never work even if they could get it to install. Even Win3.1 was painful on that machine. I remember repeating numerous times that Win98 requires at least 32 MB to run semi-decently regardless of the processor, and they kept insisting that their hard drive showed 440 MB of free "memory", so why wouldn't it be OK. A computer is just wasted on some people.

BTW, to answer your original question I concur with what blakerwry said. You could probably run XP on my 386-40 system(40 MHz coprocessor + 32 MB RAM) although it would need to have been installed on another machine. I dread to think how slow it would be, though. Probably an hour or two just to boot

 

[Tannin]

A very interesting idea, JTR. I think you'd have to go SCSI though, as I doubt that XP would fit onto the 512MB hard drive that pre-LBA motherboards are limited to. Well, you could always try the slEasy-BIOS or Disk Mangler methods, which given the stupidity of running XP on a DX-40 would be entirey appropriate, but WTF? Why not eliminate disk performance as a factor by running it on an X15?

(Ztupid human! How many 386 boardz have you got with a PCI slot for the SCSI card?)

(Woops!)

Oh well. Guess I'm lucky she pointed that out.

Maybe I could try it using one of the wonderful old Adaptec or Buslogic ISA controllers I have lying around the place, and a wide-to-narrow SCSI converter - I have one or two of those somewhere. That should work. And I have a working 486SX-20.That's slower than any 386DX I ever used. Oh no ... no co-pro. Do I have a 386SX-16 or SX-25 with co-pro? What about a Cyrix 486SCL-33? I have a working one of them. Out of (cringe) a Commodore.

(Ztupid Tannin idea Number 5678.)

(Shutup, Tea. At leazt I can zpell. DAMN IT! NOW YOU'VE GOT ME DOING IT!)

 

[Mercutio]

IIRC, Win95 won't install on a 386 unless it's an intel 386/33. I remember trying to load it on a an AMD 386/40 and getting some obnoxiously long message about not detecting an Intel 386 processor.

But yes, I've seen 98 on a 486 with 4MB of RAM, too. That was about as bad as this.

 

[blakerwry]

The one thing about winNT is that it will bluescreen on boot with less than 8mb of RAM i believe... but that's not a problem for most 486's.

Has anyone here (besides me) ran win3.0 on a 286 25mHz?

i remember playing windows solitare... and the cards would actually move at a pace that you could keep track of... a far cry from the win95 version on a pentium where the cards would litterally be flying off the screen.

 

[Fushigi]

Has anyone here (besides me) ran win3.0 on a 286 25mHz?

i remember playing windows solitare... and the cards would actually move at a pace that you could keep track of... a far cry from the win95 version on a pentium where the cards would litterally be flying off the screen.

At a previous employer, circa 1992-1993, we loaded Win3.0 (maybe 3.1) on an IBM PS/2 50z -- 10MHz 286 -- with 1MB RAM.

We quickly gave up using such a configuration, though, as simply moving the mouse around would create loads of disk activity. Using Lotus 1-2-3, our dominant PC app at the time, was out of the question.

But it did install and it did run .. well, crawl.

- Fushigi

 

[James]

i remember playing windows solitare... and the cards would actually move at a pace that you could keep track of... a far cry from the win95 version on a pentium where the cards would litterally be flying off the screen.

Probably not literally flying off the screen.

 

[LiamC]

Tannin, I'm sure I have a 387DX-20 co pro floating around if you want it

I was at one time going to put a heatsink on it and see if it would run @ 40MHz with my AMD 386/40 in a VL-bus motherboard, I also have a Promise VL-bus controller for the slot, so you should be able to get an 8GB drive on it.

Now if I can only find a reason to do something so dumb and benchmark it

Might go to the markets this weekend and see if I can find a VL bus vid card...

 

[LiamC]

Athlon Model 2200+ vs AMD 386/40 - battle of the Titans...

 

[Tannin]

A VLB video card? What brand would you like, LiamC? I should be able to supply you with your choice of Trident, Tseng, Cirrus Logic, Avance, Realtek, or best of all, one of those wonderful old Western Digitals. If you are really stupid enough to want to do it, I'll even pay for the postage. (Oh, and I'll charge you the going market rate for the cards, which is roughly $0.00.)

 

[zx]

Awww....how awful!!!

 

[Buck]

Ooooh, WD VLB video cards. I'm only left with the ISA CGA cards.

 

[LiamC]

Would anybody really like to see how far we've come in say 10 or 11 years? That's how old my 386/40 is. I think I bought it in '92.

 

[Mercutio]

I still have the motherboard from my dual 486 machine. IIRC the date on it is 1990.

 

[LiamC]

Tannin, if you've got a VL-bus card, I'll take it. - especially at that price. Let me dig out the board and see if it boots first though...

 

[.Nut]

A VLB video card? What brand would you like, LiamC? I should be able to supply you with your choice of Trident, Tseng, Cirrus Logic, Avance, Realtek, or best of all, one of those wonderful old Western Digitals. If you are really stupid enough to want to do it, I'll even pay for the postage. (Oh, and I'll charge you the going market rate for the cards, which is roughly $0.00.)

I had a VESA Loco Bus version of a Matrox ...er ...Impression 4M+ (I believe it was called) a long time ago. It was rather expensive.

 

[mubs]

I probably have a 386-SX-20 board, a 486 board, CPUs, 30-pin SIMMs, VL-bus video card, Promise VL-bus controller, smaller disk drives (40MB - 540 MB) all in working condition, and all in one box I should be able to get to without much difficulty. Anybody here that's wants 'em can have 'em. If there's any interest, I'll inventory the stuff and post my findings. Lemme know. :mrgrn:

In 1993, I bought 4 Toshiba 30-pin 4MB SIMMs for $150 each, lifetime warranty, at Fry's. It was a steal at that price.