Windows 98SE or XP on Older System?

Hardware and technical stuff
1

I’m going to need to reformat my nephew’s harddrive, due to all the crap and malware on it (see my post on Computer Security and Teenagers, below). It’s an older system with the following specs:

Duron 800 MHz processor
384M 133 MHz SDRAM
20 GB harddrive
GeForce2 MX, 32 MB

I have access to both Windows 98SE, and XP Home. I’m leaning towards upgrading the system to XP, because my nephew is terrible at managing computer security, and XP enhanced the security features of Internet Explorer in SP2. However, if XP runs like crap on older systems, I’ll stick with 98SE.

Any folks have experience in running XP on older systems?

2

I installed XP on my dads system which is a P III 600 with 256 Ram and a TNT 2. Runs ok. Go for it.

3

Yeah, I have XP on a 500 celeron and it’s ok. You’re especially good because you have more than 256mb of ram. XP likes min of 256 RAM.

4

2k.

5

Yeah, you dont’ have enough OS’s Sidd. I advise you to go and purchase another, too. Pick up a copy of DOS 6.22 while you’re at the OS store.

6

Yeah, you dont’ have enough OS’s Sidd. I advise you to go and purchase another, too. Pick up a copy of DOS 6.22 while you’re at the OS store.[/quote]

Fine, then XP, geez.

7

I ran XP successfully (although slowly) on a PII 350.

Your duron should smoke!

:D

8

Yeah, XP is fine on that rig with that amount of memory. It ran pretty well on my dad’s P3/600. And my old P3/733, for that matter.

(As for Extar’s recommendation, I’d love rational reasons to know why anyone would install 2000 over XP in the year 2005. Bizarre.)

9

Er… half the memory footprint with one less useful feature?

I used to run 2k on a PII-350 with sixty-four megs of RAM, and it ran smooth as butter. XP doesn’t do that.

10

XP runs fine on my system:

1 GHz Athlon
GeForce Ti 4400
384 mb ram

I’m betting it will run OK on yours…

11

Well, Windows 3.1 will run nicely with 2MB of RAM, if that’s your criteria.

XP’s got a hell of a lot more than “one more useful feature” over 2000. But whatever.

12

My one: Remote Desktop.

What else is there?

13

There’s that default nifty theme with the grassy hill and the blue sky. :)

14

Doable on XP, with a little tweaking of services etc. I wouldn’t recommend
anything less than 128MB even on Win2k, though ;)

15

Sorry, I wasn’t being quite fair. There are a few other really cool features of Windows XP that weren’t in 2k. For instance:

“CLEAN UP YOUR DESKTOP!!!111”

and

“HIDE ALL THE SYSTEM TRAY ICONS”

and

“STACK ALL MY IE WINDOWS SO IT TAKES FIVE MINUTES TO GET BACK TO THE ONE I WANTED”

and my personal favorite:

“YOU HAVE PLUGGED A USB 2.0 DEVICE INTO A USB 1.1 PORT IT CAN BE FASTER IF YOU INSTALL A USB 2.0 CARD EVEN THOUGH THIS IS A LAPTOP OH HEY IT’S OK IF YOU DON’T WANT TO RIGHT NOW ARE YOU SURE WELL OK I’LL JUST TELL YOU EVERY TIME YOU PLUG THE THING IN DON’T WORRY I’M ON THE CASE”

Seriously, it’s like XP is always PMSing.

16

The “Clean up your desktop” thing is irritating, but it had one really useful feature over 2000: it played Win9x stuff better. Since that included old games, it was a key feature for me.

17

How so? Compatibility mode doesn’t really do very much. Honestly, I’ve never gotten a game to work in XP that I couldn’t get to work in 2k.

18

Once I made XP look like 2k I started to like it a lot more.

The grouping of IE windows on the taskbar is easy enough to sort out and assuming the second thing you do to windows once you’ve patched it is turn off all the annoying shit , its only a couple of extra clicks.

No really, I love having files called test.txt.txt, please hide all the fricking files I actually need to see and if you would be so kind, have explorer spawn a new fucking window everytime I click on a folder, hide all the information I need about it and make the icons so bastard large I cant see anything anyway.

Should have called it Windows FP, out the box it looks like it was made by Fisher Price.

/rant off. I quite like XP now, honest.