Minimum Hardware W2K setup

[akmd]

I tried to setup W2K Pro in a P75 32MB 870 MB machine with
AWARD BISO v. 4.50PG. On running the 1st bootfloppy, it
flagged an disk I/O error and NTDETECT failed message.

What is the absolute minimum hardware for setting up W2K?
Would the AWARD BIOS v4.5PG needed to be upgraded to run
W2k?

 

[Dan Seur]

A machine here with Award v4.51PG is running W2k just fine.

The PC however is an AMD K5/100 with 64MB RAM, and is almost
never used except as tertiary file backup to its old 20GB HDD,
across a 4-machine LAN. It performs this well.

It is very slow when used from the keyboard. Even a solitaire
card game just pokes along.

I don't offhand know whether 32MB RAM is adequate for W2k to
install and execute. But if you have a disk I/O error I'd
check for a bad disk first. You can download a drive diagnostic
from the drive manufacturer's website.

The machine is elderly and you don't say whether it's currently
running any system at all. If it is, and it's a DOS-based OS
like W9x, you're probably better off staying with that; W2k
will be much less responsive. If it is not running now, see
whether it will run DOS.

If you post again, give any error messages in detail, verbatim.
Approximate paraphrases aren't good enough.

 

[akmd]

Thanks for the BIOS info. Interesting to know that a
k5/100 works with w2k. I read that the mininum would be a
P-133 and 32 MB.

My machine runs fine with DOS, Win95 and W98SE. Looks
like W2K does not like the 75 MHz CPU. It is just a
challenge to revive old machines to work on some late
version software.

 

[Dan Seur]

Before repling the first time, I could not find the Win2k min sys
requirements by searching the Microsoft site, although I was
sure they're there. When I saw this reply, I tried again, this time with
Google, using search arguments ["windows 2000" "system requirements"]
which instantly returned exactly what you need. From the MS site, where
their own homegrown search engine didn't find it!

<http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/professional/evaluation/sysreqs/default.asp>


Looks like you may be out of luck on two counts - CPU speed and min RAM...

 

[philo]

I tried to setup W2K Pro in a P75 32MB 870 MB machine with
AWARD BISO v. 4.50PG. On running the 1st bootfloppy, it
flagged an disk I/O error and NTDETECT failed message.

What is the absolute minimum hardware for setting up W2K?
Would the AWARD BIOS v4.5PG needed to be upgraded to run
W2k?

microsoft says: a p133 with 64megs of ram
so a p75 with 32megs of ram is not even thinkable...
that's not even too great for win98 really

to even begin to run it well you really need
a p233 with 196 megs of ram

or with a faster cpu you may even get by with 128 megs of ram

i don't know if it's my imagination....
but win2k seemed to have improved a bit after sp4 was installed