XP on old computers

Matt Russell · 17 Jan 2007 at 13:15

I've got a couple of old (pentium 3) computers i'd like to put xp on. Does anyone know of a website/guide or something that could help me strip down the non-essentials of xp to get them running as smoothly as possible?

Cheers,
Matt

Brian The Snail · 17 Jan 2007 at 13:35

My tech guy here at work has successfully installed XP on a 500MHz Celeron with 128MB. He also installed Office 2000. There were no real performance hits. He also tested an XP install on a PII 266 with 96MB RAM. No Office this time but again, it worked OK.

In both cases he turned off all the extras (themes, animation etc) to improve performance.

There is an excellent application called nLite (http://www.nliteos.com/) you can use that has a graphical interface and enables you to strip out what you don't need then rebuild the install media.

bledd · 17 Jan 2007 at 13:38

nlite is what you're looking for

you copy your xp disc to a current install, say C:\xpcd

run nlite and point it at the folder, integrate SP2 and the ryanvm hotfix pack

remove components, enter details etc, burn to cdrw

Minstadave · 17 Jan 2007 at 14:05

Yup I managed to create an XP install using Nlite that was usable on an original pentium overclocked to 233Mhz with 192MBs of EDO RAM, it was slow but ok for IE and office.

wesley · 17 Jan 2007 at 14:12

i've installed XP pro (not nlite) on old PC, amd k6-2 550mhz with 256mb PC100 ram. it was speedy for very basic stuff like ie, office and msn. I noticed massively improved in speed after i upgraded to 256mb ram, before was 128mb

so 256mb or above is a must on any old PC's

Brian The Snail · 17 Jan 2007 at 16:19

wesley said:
so 256mb or above is a must on any old PC's

Spoke to an MSSE or whatever they are called these days. He said the same thing - 256MB ram and you can, within reason, use any old hardware.

OspreyO · 17 Jan 2007 at 16:32

I run XP on a few old PC's. I reckon PII 400mhz with 192mb is the min to have good experience. Turn off all graphic effects, shadows, themes and keep a lower res like 1024 and 256 colours or 64k instead of millions of colours. Turn of disk indexing and run as few services as possible. Try using an older version of Office too or a lite shareware apps instead. Office is overkill for most. On the web use FF and block ads and flash and you should be ok.