Can a Win98 machine really be upgraded to WinXP Pro

  • Thread starter Thread starter Yobbo
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Y

Yobbo

Hi All

I have a teacher with 16 x Win98 machines, who thought that if we could
upgrade the memory to 256MB, they are currently on 64MB, then we could
upgrade them to WinXP Pro and they would run quite happily.

Having seen that these are quite old machines with 8GB or so diskspace and
what looks to be 1GHz processors (thereabouts) I can't see them running
WinXP Pro other than like a pig even with 512MB of RAM!!!

Would you agree with me or is it possible for these machines to be upgraded
and run smoothly?

Thanks

Yobbo
 
Yobbo said:
Hi All

I have a teacher with 16 x Win98 machines, who thought that if we could
upgrade the memory to 256MB, they are currently on 64MB, then we could
upgrade them to WinXP Pro and they would run quite happily.

Having seen that these are quite old machines with 8GB or so diskspace and
what looks to be 1GHz processors (thereabouts) I can't see them running
WinXP Pro other than like a pig even with 512MB of RAM!!!

Would you agree with me or is it possible for these machines to be
upgraded
and run smoothly?

Thanks

Yobbo
Click to expand...
You can get them to run with 256MB. How well they run depends on the speed
of the disks, speed of the processor, and size of the applications.

8GB disks are too small for efficient use.
A 1GHZ processor is adequate (but barely so).

Jim
 
Yobbo said:
Hi All

I have a teacher with 16 x Win98 machines, who thought that if we could
upgrade the memory to 256MB, they are currently on 64MB, then we could
upgrade them to WinXP Pro and they would run quite happily.

Having seen that these are quite old machines with 8GB or so diskspace and
what looks to be 1GHz processors (thereabouts) I can't see them running
WinXP Pro other than like a pig even with 512MB of RAM!!!

Would you agree with me or is it possible for these machines to be upgraded
and run smoothly?

Thanks

Yobbo
Click to expand...


Assuming all other components meet WinXP's much more stringent hardware
quality requirements, with 1GHz CPUs and 256Mb of RAM, the computers in
question will run WinXP adequately for school work, though they
certainly won't be speed demons. If the school is planning to use any
applications, however, the hard drives will need to be upgraded; 8Gb is
far too small for anything but the OS (and swap file, recycle bin,
system volume).


--

Bruce Chambers

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Yobbo said:
Hi All

I have a teacher with 16 x Win98 machines, who thought that if we could
upgrade the memory to 256MB, they are currently on 64MB, then we could
upgrade them to WinXP Pro and they would run quite happily.

Having seen that these are quite old machines with 8GB or so diskspace and
what looks to be 1GHz processors (thereabouts) I can't see them running
WinXP Pro other than like a pig even with 512MB of RAM!!!

Would you agree with me or is it possible for these machines to be upgraded
and run smoothly?

Thanks

Yobbo
Click to expand...


If the school doesn't have the budget for 16 new comps along with the OS
and applications a memory upgrade alone would improve things, 64MG isn't
much even for W98. But XP wouldn't run on that ancient hardware in any
fashion that I would care to use. The small & slow hard drives would be
a killer right from the start.

Have you checked hardware compatibility ...

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hcl/default.mspx

John
 
It's possible they will still be usable for school tasks - a lot depends on
what programs the teacher wants to run.

As others have said, 256MB minimum, 512 is better. Bigger hard drives,
though again, how much bigger depends on apps - 40GB drives can be had for
$40 or less, and ought to be sufficient.

I have a 1GHz PIII at school I keep for students to use in the office for
debugging Visual C++, and some use of Office 2003. It works fine for those
tasks.

Val
 
What you can do is attempt to upgrade one of them only (the beta) and see
what happens and how it feels. You can take a 64 ram out of another machine
(temporarily) and install it on to the beta pc to achieve the required ram.
If necessary you can take out a harddrive and install it on the beta as a
slave. But the ram is priority and the harddrives can wait until the
experiment with the beta machine is over.

Then, because windows xp can be installed and used for a limited number of
times before it stops working for lack of activation, you could use someone
elses winxp cd to setup the beta machine. WinXP can function on 2 gigs and
you will get an idea of what to expect from it on your beta machine.

If you prefer to upgrade all 16 and you are satisfied that your beta pc
worked ok, then I estimate the cost to be for each pc upgrade to be maybe 30
bucks for a 256 ram and maybe 40 bucks for a 40 gigabyte hd and the cost of
one winxp license for a school maybe at another 50 or 60 bucks. The total
seems to be no more than 150 bucks per machine to upgrade an old machine.
But there can be other issues like the cd or video card may be uncompatiable
to winxp.

If the above configuration works then you can take 8 of the pc's and utilize
their ram and harddrives to upgrade the other 8. Then your budget can be to
purchase 8 top of the line machines. Here is one site that can help you a
bit more but there are others:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?Lprice=100&Hprice=199.99&CatId=6

If I had a choice to spend 150 bucks in upgrading some of th devices for an
old machine or to spend 150 bucks and buy the whole pc that is of current
configuration, i would chuck the old machines, put setiments aside and a
better machine.... However, in your case the old machines with there current
configurations can still be used for something, like games, internet,
etc.....
 
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