XP on a P233 with 64MB RAM

I uncle has just installed XP on this laptop specificaiton. It is running very slowly I have told him to upgrade to 128MB RAM as it may help a little but is there anything else he needs to do?

 

I'd suggest upgrading the RAM to at least 192 Mb, as 128 Mb of RAM on XP is still very slow, even on machines which have processors far faster than the one you are asking about it.

Turn off indexing, system restore and XP themes.

 

Even 128MB of ram is absolute torture with XP in my experience unless you really tweak it (no visual styles, no fancy fading effects, disable fast user switching etc). Otherwise I'd look at getting at least 256MB if you want to do anything useful at a decent speed with XP.

Windows XP as standard takes up about 90MB of ram as soon as you're on the desktop, but with only 128Mb of ram, and on a laptop you may have integrated graphics taking away 8Mb or so of that, you won't need to do much (open a couple of word documents and a web browser for example) until you'll run out of ram and will have to start using the page file off the hard drive, which slows the computer down massively (as the hard drive is much slower than ram).

 

Thanks so do you think if you have 256MB RAM and then turn off those things it will run quite smoothyl with a 233Mhz processor? On any new system I not use XP without 256MB RAM but considering this laptop is a Pentium MMX 233 will the processor slow things down too much?

 

graphics card will also be a bottle neck - he should wind down the resolution and colour settings - this would help, but he should bite the bullet and buy a new machine. I like Dell, IME I have never had any problems and Im a pretty hard core laptop user (Dell for last 4 years) - I have the D800 widescreen jobby at the moment

 

Lol I doubt he will do that, he already has four computers (all modern) his laptop is just a toy he got cheaply. Maybe he should put Windows 3.1 on it

 

A 233 MMX will run XP, albeit pretty slowly - a faster cpu would be much better. I 've found that past a certain point memory becomes more important than sheer cpu speed, for example running XP on a 733Mhz p3 system with 512Mb of ram 'feels' much better to use within windows XP than a 1 Ghz p3 with only 192Mb of ram.

A 233Mhz chip may still bottleneck you so much though that however much memory you put in it'll still be pretty sluggish - I'd suggest borrowing a stick of ram and seeing whether its bearable with 256Mb, but with a laptop this is more difficult (laptop type DIMMs are rarer and more expensive, and fitting the extra stick can be more complicated depending on the particular model).

TBH unless he absolutely has to have XP on it, I'd stick 98SE on there and be done with it - that'll run fine .

 

get him to stick 98SE or 2000 on it, should be a much more enjoyable experiance

 

Yeah I have Windows 9SE on my laptop its perfectly fine and copes with Firefox ok. The original question he asked me was can he upgrade the processor but I said you can't really as 233MMX was the highest the Intel socket 7 chips went and a Cyrix or AMD socket 7 chip would run too hot.

 

I'd stick with 98SE. 2000 is not much less demanding than XP.

 

I disagree. My wife's old laptop was an old Sony Vaio 266MMX with 176Mb of RAM and XP ran much faster than 98 on it plus it was about a million times more stable.

Michael.

 

I've built loads of pretty crappy machines at work, and the low spec ones always run shit-loads faster with 98SE than 2000 or XP.

 

Same - something is amiss of 98SE is slower than XP on a machine of that age, though I can see XP being the more stable (XP is generally a more stable OS than 98SE in my experience).

 

I'm not saying it's a general case, just saying what happened with the specific laptop in question where XP was definitely faster than 98.

Michael.

 

You can dramatically reduce XP's manic resourse gulping by deciding which services you actually need running - XP runs far more than most people need by default. Check out www.blackviper.com/WinXP/service411.htm

Tony.