How will XP run on this machine?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Trent SC
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Trent SC

I'm looking at rebuilding a colleague's mongrel PC and at the moment it runs
Windows 98se, albeit with some unknown problems that cause it to hang on a
fairly regular basis. I have a choice of reinstalling 98 and having the
usual struggle of finding drivers, getting them properly configured and
making sure they don't clash, or going with XP.

The only thing is, I don't know how XP will run on the machine. It has a
Celeron 766 with 320 MB of RAM, a 10GB hard drive and Intel 810 onboard
graphics (although I have the option of a Trident 9440 PCI graphics card if
I want it).

So, what does the group think - will XP run like a dog or is it worth the
upgrade?

Thanks in advance.
 
No problem -- XP will run fine on it. I have several 233s with 128MB of RAM
and 6GB HDs that XP runs on (slowly, but it runs) -- and the machines are
pretty stable.

Obviously it won't be super fast on a 766 (although faster than 98), but it
should be considerably more stable than your 98 installation, and drivers
should be much less painful (XPs driver base is fairly comprehensive).

--LB
 
Trent said:
I'm looking at rebuilding a colleague's mongrel PC and at the moment it runs
Windows 98se, albeit with some unknown problems that cause it to hang on a
fairly regular basis. I have a choice of reinstalling 98 and having the
usual struggle of finding drivers, getting them properly configured and
making sure they don't clash, or going with XP.

The only thing is, I don't know how XP will run on the machine. It has a
Celeron 766 with 320 MB of RAM, a 10GB hard drive and Intel 810 onboard
graphics (although I have the option of a Trident 9440 PCI graphics card if
I want it).

So, what does the group think - will XP run like a dog or is it worth the
upgrade?

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
XP will run on that machine fine and it is much more stable than 98.
 
Trent SC said:
I'm looking at rebuilding a colleague's mongrel PC and at the moment it runs
Windows 98se, albeit with some unknown problems that cause it to hang on a
fairly regular basis. I have a choice of reinstalling 98 and having the
usual struggle of finding drivers, getting them properly configured and
making sure they don't clash, or going with XP.

The only thing is, I don't know how XP will run on the machine. It has a
Celeron 766 with 320 MB of RAM, a 10GB hard drive and Intel 810 onboard
graphics (although I have the option of a Trident 9440 PCI graphics card if
I want it).

So, what does the group think - will XP run like a dog or is it worth the
upgrade?

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

That system should do just fine. 10GB of hard drive space should be plenty, but don't forget to disable System Restore or at least limit the amount of space it can use. It would also help if the end-user employed some computing practices that made resident firewalls and and virus-scanners unnecessary.

Good Luck,

carl
 
I'm looking at rebuilding a colleague's mongrel PC and at the moment it
runs
Windows 98se, albeit with some unknown problems that cause it to hang on a
fairly regular basis. I have a choice of reinstalling 98 and having the
usual struggle of finding drivers, getting them properly configured and
making sure they don't clash, or going with XP.

The only thing is, I don't know how XP will run on the machine. It has a
Celeron 766 with 320 MB of RAM, a 10GB hard drive and Intel 810 onboard
graphics (although I have the option of a Trident 9440 PCI graphics card
if
I want it).

So, what does the group think - will XP run like a dog or is it worth the
upgrade?

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

That system should do just fine. 10GB of hard drive space should be plenty,
but don't forget to disable System Restore or at least limit the amount of
space it can use. It would also help if the end-user employed some
computing practices that made resident firewalls and and virus-scanners
unnecessary.


Thanks to all for the quick and helpful responses. I shall go forwards with
the XP installation...
 
I'm looking at rebuilding a colleague's mongrel PC and at the moment it runs
Windows 98se, albeit with some unknown problems that cause it to hang on a
fairly regular basis. I have a choice of reinstalling 98 and having the
usual struggle of finding drivers, getting them properly configured and
making sure they don't clash, or going with XP.

The only thing is, I don't know how XP will run on the machine. It has a
Celeron 766 with 320 MB of RAM, a 10GB hard drive and Intel 810 onboard
graphics (although I have the option of a Trident 9440 PCI graphics card if
I want it).
Click to expand...

Being an Intel 810 chipset and having more than 128MB of RAM, you've
already got the basics of a reasonable machine. The CPU is not all that
slow for it's time, and as long as you turn off the eye-candy it will be
reasonable. The real key is the 256+ MB of memory.
 
I'm looking at rebuilding a colleague's mongrel PC and at the moment it
Being an Intel 810 chipset and having more than 128MB of RAM, you've
already got the basics of a reasonable machine. The CPU is not all that
slow for it's time, and as long as you turn off the eye-candy it will be
reasonable. The real key is the 256+ MB of memory.
Click to expand...

As an aside, should I go with the onboard graphics or the Trident PCI card?
 
As an aside, should I go with the onboard graphics or the Trident PCI card?
Click to expand...

I've not used the 810 on-board video in a long time and I never buy
Trident cards due to quality. The on-board will use System Memory, which
is always slower than video card memory directly on the video card, but
it's a trade-off. Your PCI trident card may not be much faster. Try the
Trident and if it works you're in good shape.
 
Vagabond Software said:
That system should do just fine. 10GB of hard drive space should be plenty, but don't forget to disable System Restore
Click to expand...

Bad advice. Dangerously bad. Never repeat never disable System
Restore unless you consider your entire hard drive contents to be
totally disposable with no need for recovery of anything.

or at least limit the amount of space it can use.
Click to expand...

Limiting the system restore space is a valid suggestion. Generally
500 mb or so is quite adequate and allows for several days worth of
restore points under most circumstances.
It would also help if the end-user employed some computing practices that made resident firewalls and and virus-scanners unnecessary.
Click to expand...

Specific suggestions as to how to accomplish this state of Nirvana?


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."
 
Trent SC said:
As an aside, should I go with the onboard graphics or the Trident PCI card?
Click to expand...

Stick with the onboard graphics. They will give superior performance
to anything you can get in a PCI bus graphics card. Now if the
motherboard had an AGP graphics slot and you had a 4x AGP video card
that would be a different situation.

Also even with 320 mb of RAM (presumably 2 modules 64 and 256) you
might find that more RAM would provide a noticeable boost in
performance.

After you have XP installed and everything configured and running
download MVP Bill James' free page file usage monitor utility from
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm or from
http://billsway.com/notes_public/WinXP_Tweaks/ and run it to check on
how much actual memory content has been paged out from RAM to the page
file. If that value gets larger than 50 mb or so on a regular basis
then it is very likely that adding more RAM will provide a performance
boost.

Good luck


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."
 
Bad advice. Dangerously bad. Never repeat never disable System
Restore unless you consider your entire hard drive contents to be
totally disposable with no need for recovery of anything.
Click to expand...

well i guess i do what should never, ever, be done. i ALWAYS turn off the
system restore, and leave it off. (I think this opinion comes from
Windows Me, which introduced the 'System Restore', and insisted that i
had a hidden directory on the root of the c drive named _RESTORE.)

from what i've read here, it a 50-50 shot on whether or not doing a
system restore will fix whatever ails you.

i also disable windows file protection as well.

why would not having the restore on cause you NOT to be able to use any
of your data files if you have a _configuration_ problem ?

the restore's not going to help anything if there's some type of data
loss that would require actual data recovery. what makes it more
difficult to rescue files is if the disk is NTFS, or even worse,
ENCRYPTED NTFS. I'm not saying that FAT32 is better than NTFS either,
just to each his own.

of course i'm not your average user that looks for help here either, and
i understand the implications of my configuration choices.


regards,

DanS
 
Ron Martell said:
Bad advice. Dangerously bad. Never repeat never disable System
Restore unless you consider your entire hard drive contents to be
totally disposable with no need for recovery of anything.
Click to expand...

I always disable System Restore on low end machines as it only restores system state, which could be recovered in other ways, and it is not a given that System Restore will work even for this narrow task. No personal/working data is backed up or recovered by using System Restore! Everything else on a computer IS disposable because it CAN be recovered by re-installing if nothing else. It's all about the user's data!
Limiting the system restore space is a valid suggestion. Generally
500 mb or so is quite adequate and allows for several days worth of
restore points under most circumstances.


Specific suggestions as to how to accomplish this state of Nirvana?
Click to expand...

Sure!
1. If you're on broadband, make sure you have a router at a minimum.
2. Use secure browser settings (IE users should learn to love the Trusted Sites zone).
3. Don't permit file transfers or file-sharing in messenging clients.
4. Never launch email attachments that were not explicitly expected whether or not the sender is known.
5. Never download and launch files from unknown/obscure sites, especially files with dubious content (porn, pirated media, game cheats, etc).
6. Backup your Documents and Settings folder on a scheduled basis.
7. Direct applications to save configuration/logs/data back to your Documents and Settings folder structure.
8. Use 'linkd.exe' to create NTFS junction points to applications that will not direct settings/data files back to the Documents and Settings folder.

Use these practices and there will never be a need for real-time virus scanning or firewalls. Just manually launch or schedule a periodic full virus scan and that should be adequate.

carl
 
In
DanS said:
well i guess i do what should never, ever, be done. i ALWAYS
turn off
the system restore, and leave it off. (I think this opinion
comes from
Windows Me, which introduced the 'System Restore', and insisted
that i
had a hidden directory on the root of the c drive named
_RESTORE.)

from what i've read here, it a 50-50 shot on whether or not
doing a
system restore will fix whatever ails you.
Click to expand...


Although System Restore is unfortunately not perfect, and
sometimes doesn't work at all, it works *way* more than 50% of
the time.

It's not the solution to all problems, of course, and even if it
works the way it's supposed to, it may not fix your problem.

But so what. There's no tool that fixes all problems, and that's
why it's good to have multiple tools in your tookit. A hammer
won't fix a loose screw, but it's still a good idea to own a
hammer as well as a screwdriver.

System restore has gotten me and many others I know out of
trouble many times. Perfect or not, as far as I'm concerned, it's
simply foolhardy to turn it off.
 
Bad advice. Dangerously bad. Never repeat never disable System
Restore unless you consider your entire hard drive contents to be
totally disposable with no need for recovery of anything.
Click to expand...

NEVER run system restore...repeat...NEVER!

All it is is a haven for virii to hide. Almost every anti-virus
company out there tells you to turn off System Restore when trying to
recover from a bad virus. Why do you think that is?

If you have a good cloning procedure for the os partition, you won't
need System Restore.


Have a nice one...

Trent

Budweiser: Helping ugly people have sex since 1876!
 
They want SR off so their software won't alarm the user. If their AV program put it in SR, we know that the AV detects that virus. If they restore the virus will be deleted again (and go back into SR). I don't see an issue except the AV will flag it in SR (where it's not hurting anyone).

Make a manual restore, use disk cleanup to clear all but last restore point.

I also don't use SR because it's a very stupid thing to do. It also deleted a data file with a value of $120,000.00 (a long time ago, now fixed, but still ...). I had a copy but if it had have happened a day later I wouldn't have. Why we can't go back to factory default settings I'll never know.
 
Trent© said:
NEVER run system restore...repeat...NEVER!
Click to expand...


Balderdash. Hogwash. Malarkey.
All it is is a haven for virii to hide. Almost every anti-virus
company out there tells you to turn off System Restore when trying to
recover from a bad virus. Why do you think that is?
Click to expand...


Mostly because their tech support depts are run by incompetent
bungling nincompoops. Any virus that is in the System Restore data
is totally encapsulated there and cannot cause any further infections
or spread anywhere.

If you have a good cloning procedure for the os partition, you won't
need System Restore.
Click to expand...

If. And if pigs had wings they could fly. What percentage of the
people who read these newsgroups have that type of cloning procedure
in place? Or even have the hardware (disk space) and software
necessary for doing it? It is something less than
..0000000000000001% of the total.


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."
 
David said:
You have never owned a hammer I take it. Hammers can do any task. I LOVE hammers.
Click to expand...

A big rock is even better than a hammer. A big rock can fix anything,
especially when it comes to computers. This bigger the rock, the better
the fix.

Oh, and there's a lot to be said for big windows, too, the kind on the
second floor (or higher) that a computer will fit though. Big windows
come in handy when you don't have a big enough rock to do the job properly.

Steve
 
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