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Originally Posted by devilsadvocate
Then either I'm blessed or you're cursed. Just a few months ago I installed it on 2 separate machines (1 with a 30GB drive and 1 with a 40GB, both ATA-133) for a friend of mine to unload on FleaBay for US$15 or whatever. Both had 128 MB RAM and 733 MHz processors (one was an AMD K6 I believe, the other an Intel Celeron). All the way through a Service Pack 3 update, neither would win any races but neither choked. One of my long-ago store-bought Gateway machines had 256 MB and a Celeron; XP didn't give me any more problems than anyone else dealt with and I was greedy, at least by 2003 standards.
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I guess it depends on what you're willing to settle for.
XP technically "runs" in 256MB of RAM, for suitable values of "run". If you're willing to wait for several minutes for operations to complete, it might be OK.
In the installs you mention, how long did it take XP to boot from a cold start? How long did it take in invoke, say Word (or Open Office Writer). How long did it take to load Firefox, and what was it like once up?
If your answers to any of the above are less than one minute, please tell me what magic spell you used. Did you burn the manual on the altar with the sheep guts?
For a 128MB RAM box, I'd install Linux, make sure I gave it a swap partition twice the size of RAM, and have low expectations of what it would do. (On my notebook, for example, I don't even try to access YouTube - I see a slideshow of still pictures, not video.)
There
was a poster on the Puppy forums who detailed how he got Puppy up an a machine with
16MB RAM. It involved stripping out everything he could remove that would still permit a GUI using JWM, and he had to build the actual image on a more powerful machine and trasfer it to the target box when it was ready.
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Doesn't surprise me; drive I/O is the biggest speed killer of them all.
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Which is why more RAM to provide a larger and more effective cache is the first performance enhancement I recommend. PCs are I/O bound, not compute bound, and spend most of their time waiting for something, like a read or write to complete. As the pundit once said "All machines wait at the same speed".
A faster processor is usually not a significant improvement.
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Gnome uses GTK. So does XFCE, though not as extensively. This is why Ubuntu (and Fedora) suffer from what I've referred to as a 3BGD error, for "3 Billion Gnome Dependencies".
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Gnome may use GTK, but the converse is not true. Wiping the Xubuntu install and installing from MinimalCD gave me a system that was usable, with a choice of XFCE or LXDE as the GUI when I boot into it. (I prefer XFCE, and use it under Puppy as well, in place fo the default JWM.)
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That's why I mentioned the multiboot CD in the first place; don't need a floppy drive that way, just make ISOs. Just trying to be helpful.
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I'll look at it. The biggest use for a USB floppy at the moment would be booting from a Windows boot floppy, which might let me successfully install Win98SE to a specified partition. I tried running Setup from the Win98 CD when booted into FreeDOS, but setup claimed it needed at least 16MB RAM to continue. FreeDOS sees the full RAM, and I can use XMS to create a 2MB RAMdisk and 8MB of cache, but whatever it's reporting to Windows setup obviously isn't what it wants to see.
I can boot from the CD and run Setup, but then it insists on trying to format and use the entire drive.
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Dennis