Xp Home on 256 ram
 

My girlfriends family is trying to run XP Home on only 256 megs of ram. I've already disabled the fancy effects like shadows, fading menues, etc, but its still slow as fuck. It doesn't help that they like to click YES to whatever happenes to pop up, so there is assloads of spyware and shit on there (I had pestpatrol remove 153 yesterday, and adaware never did finish scanning while I was over).

Is there anything I can do to speed it up other than trying to overclock?

You could try going through one of the many online XP tweaking guides. Other than that there's not much you can do (apart from upgrading hardware etc). Just know that if/when it gets infected with spyware/malware again, all your efforts will be in vain.

If you do get it running nice and smoothly, they'll probably end up calling you every time something goes wrong, which (depending on your point of view) could be a good thing or a bad thing. But, if you mess something up (even if it's not your fault), it could have all sorts of repercussions. You'd have to be crazy to attempt overclocking.

Personally, i wouldnt touch it.

I didn't want to get to invasive on their system, that's why I havn't done anything much (like follwoing the online guids) other than installing a firewall (they have DSL, so I figured they'd need it) and removing some spyware.

I'll see if I can just get them to buy another 256 stick at the least. Oh well, sucks to be them I 'spose.

There is another trick,
first you setup windows 98SE or windows 2000 both will run smoothly on 256 ram.
Than you setup the xp on top of the other OS.
it will look like XP have the funcions XP has but actually runs on the engine from either 98SE or 2000.

did this on the old desktop 350Mhz -256MB it worked like a charme


ps don't try this with windows ME , it will be a very unstable OS.

There's no way can you keep using the 98SE/2k kernel after doing an upgrade install of XP. Whoever lead you to believe that has no clue at all.

Even going from 98 to 2k would be a non starter, given that 98 is based around the old DOS kernel and 2k isn't, two totally different fish altogether, you could run two OS's on the same box using a dual boot system, but that would mean you just boot to 98 or 2k when you start up, whoever told you simply upgrading on top of the old one keeps the same core is bullshiting you.

Dlink, see if you can do an upgrade to 2K, it'll run without needing huge chunks of memory and it's every bit as stable and secure as XP is.

Xp runs on the same engine windows 2000 does that i know for sure, it's only a bit improved.

Than explain Atmo why did the option appeared to take the system back to win98SE after upgrading? (btw it was xp PRO maybe that makes any difference)
have i messed up with the setting that much that it gave me things that you say are impossible??

You had the option to roll back to 98?

Amazing, my XP pro install at home won't even let me install XP home or anything lower on it, fails on the install everytime 'there is a newer version of windows already installed on this pc' etc etc etc.

Nothing short of a clean install would let me go back from XP to 2k or 2k to 98

Re: Xp Home on 256 ram
 

My panrent comp runs XP pro on 128 mgs of RAM no problem.
I went through and picked out the useless services in services.msc (indexing and system restore are the big ones), and I turned off all the preformance panel things except themes and common folder tasks.

I also run them in limited user account and don't let them install shit.

Re: Re: Xp Home on 256 ram
 

Most useful tip so far, by far!

it runs, but its slow as fuck. takes seconds to bring up start menue, ditto for "programs" its just no fun to work on.

Next time I go over I'll see if I can get rid of indexing and stuff like that (they don't do filesearching, everything is just in their "my documents" folder :p They are quite computer illerate.

If i place the win 2000 disk in the player , it automaticly gives me the option of making a dual boot.
I must have screwed up with the settings ( i tweaked this system with xp tweaks comming out of a pc magazine)

Can you tell me how you know this for sure?

Windows XP = Windows NT 5.1
Windows 2000 = Windows NT 5.0

Right..?

run windows xp setup , in one of the screens you see during the process, you see the lines that cleary state

windows xp is built on the windows 2000 engine which makes this a stable OS. (don't hold me to the exact lines 'cause i have a dutch version off course and this was freely translated)

XP's kernel is based on the NT/2000 kernel. There are many differences though.

It is possible to rollback when you do an upgrade install. Just like you can when you choose to backup the system files when you install a service pack.

@Atmo , can't tell anymore the 350 is currently in use with a linux OS.

My son is an expert when it comes to screwing things up and with the subscription to a pc magazine came a version of linux , totally free so we set it up.

i hate to say it, but MS anti-spyware is actually ok

also spysweeper is good and free for 30 days

i've made computers(with 256mb of RAM) run somewhat faster by setting the virtual RAM to 192mb. initial and maximum size set to 192mb. it sped the computers up a bit.

Well there's your problem..probably has a shit load of backdoors on it as well.

Absolutely no reason why xp home should not run reasonably well on a 256 stick of ram. I'm gonna assume that it's an of the shelf model which means xphome, it should have a processor in the range of say +1.8gig (celeron probably if it's a cheapy set-up).
I ran xppro on a P2 400meg with 128k ram for close on 18-20mnths with little problem. That is of course it's base running paremeters.

I'd advice a complete bck-up of all data and re-install. Then install all your av, firewall, anti-spyware,

AVG Free
Zone Alarm Free
Spybot Free
Ad-Aware Free

I've used all those 4 for the last 3+ years and have yet to be compromised.... that includes the ejit who tried to load Trojan Horse IRC/BackDoor.Sd.Bot.185.BE last night when I passed through here strangely enough. (Notice I say tried - Little do they know I got there fecking proxy and core I.P at the same time - U just gotta love Hacker Eliminator ;) - Think I'll have a play at the weekend :ebil laugh: )

Anyway do the above dlink and it should sort it out - remember to have your mb driver disks etc

Seen that problem day in day out over the last year or so and that fix's it up every time... Not a hard job - backing the data up takes the longest time.
System should be back up and running in a couple of hours after format...


nb: I charge 50-75euro for a job like that ;)

Correct.

Windows Server 2003 = Windows NT 5.2

Windows "Longhorn" = Windows NT 6.0

More like
Windows "Longhorn" = Windows NT 5.21
the way it's looking now.

WinFS was going to be cool.

Re: Xp Home on 256 ram
 

My little sister's computer is an old 700MHz PIII with 128MB of RAM, and it even starts up faster than my 3.4GHz lappy with 1024MB of RAM; all thanks to Spyware Blaster and Ad-Aware. I would suggest just redoing the spyware scan and everything should run smoothly without a hitch. :)

The best thing you can do to speed up their computer and prevent problems in the future is spend 20 minutes giving them a primer on internet security. You know, the things that are more important than anti-virus, anti-spyware and firewalls, like the KNOWLEDGE of when to install something and when not to, and otherwise how to "surf with common sense".

In my experience doing this with internet novices pays off more than even a full suite of security programs. And in the long run they'll appreciate you teaching them more than you just installing and tweaking stuff. (But actually you'd be doing both...teach them safe surfing while you install stuff.)

As Atmo was alluding to, reducing the amount they'd be looking to you to continually fix problems (and the ramifications that would be associated with that) could be particularly important if you and this girl have a real future ahead of you. ;)

I run XP Pro on 256. It runs fast as hell and all of the standard visual effects are in place. So don't blame the ram :)

Anyway, like Scor said, just teach them a thing or two. I have people constantly asking me to fix some sort of problem they have, and usually it's those simpl ID-10-T issues. Some simple education helps a great deal.

maybe if you increased the paging file? (my computer properties advanced virtual memory) it should be about 3 times the size of your memory and also what is the L2 cache size (usually found *on* the cpu or otherwise) mines now 2mb lol, my settings go as found:

3000 mb paging file minimum - 512 nb ram (just extra I'm a gamer)
CPU 3.2 Ghz L2 2mb

also what would she like to do with her pc / laptop ? graphics web-design err gaming? etc., word procesing

edit: btw paging file is your swap space aswell (when programs import data into the lower memory I think )

I bought my laptop in 2002, it came with XP Home and 256 MB RAM. It ran quite fast, but I do take care with spyware, etc. I could play GTA 3 on it with few problems (until it started to overheat because of the shite heatsink). So yes, it can be done. Just try and educate them a bit in interent usage, like the above have said.

I ran one of the early XP's releases (one of the betas, don't remember which) on my old HP. 533 MHz Celeron with 64 MB ram. Was dual booting along with Win98se. Both ran fine.

Same here. Currently running Windows XP Pro on a machine with a 500MHz AMD K6 CPU and 256 MB RAM, which is seen as 128, and has 16MB (32? I don't remember off the top of my head) shared to the video card, which is turned off, but still takes that much RAM just to spite me.

Fun computer. :D

yeah ive ran xp on a cyrix 333 with 64 of ram. ran, but not well

dlink did you get ALL of the spyware off of it yet? That would be the next logical step

I agree... look for spyware, adware and viruses. They steal lots of performance.