Pentium III 450hz with 512Megs Ram ?

[JGM]

will a Pentium III 450hz with 512Megs Ram work OK with Xp?
Any Comments ? I presently using WinME and am finding it OK with Office and
Photoshop ! Will it be Better or worse?

 

[jeffrey]

Hi,

It will work, but not sure if it will be any faster then ME, but I beleive
it will be more stable though.

Jeff

 

[Ken Blake]

In

will a Pentium III 450hz with 512Megs Ram work OK with Xp?

OK, yes. Fast, no.

Any Comments ? I presently using WinME and am finding it OK
with
Office and Photoshop ! Will it be Better or worse?

I doubt if you'll see any substantial difference in performance
either way.

 

[Roger Bryant]

Thusly, it was spoken by the voices from within JGM's head on 11/1/2004
4:13 PM:

will a Pentium III 450hz with 512Megs Ram work OK with Xp?
Any Comments ? I presently using WinME and am finding it OK with Office and
Photoshop ! Will it be Better or worse?

I run a PIII 866hz with 320 megs. Xp can be a wee bit slow, but it's
more stable than WInME (which I also have also a multi-boot machine).
Normally, I would say go with XP, howver in your case since the
processor speed is at the bottom end of the spectrum and you say that ME
works, Im going to say if it ain't broke, then don't try to fix it.

 

[DanS]

will a Pentium III 450hz with 512Megs Ram work OK with Xp?
Any Comments ? I presently using WinME and am finding it OK with
Office and Photoshop ! Will it be Better or worse?

While it will be slower than P4's at 2-3 ghz, I think it will be usable
with most non-CPU intensive software. Photoshop can be CPU intensive at
times.

The 512 Megs of RAM really helps out. My PC is only a 1 Ghz Athlon w/512
megs of RAM, so roughly 2x the CPU speed and while I'm hurting for an
upgrade, the performance is quite acceptable for what I do on a regular
basis. You've got to remember, the majority of the people out there don't
do CPU intensive video rendering, or work on giant graphics. I've also P3
550(?) mHz w/128 Megs, Toshiba laptop w/XP that is acceptable. Any
problems I have with that I chalk up to it being a Toshiba. I've also got
an AMD K6-2 450 with only 64 meg's of RAM running a Server2003 domain at
my home. While it's not a speed demon, it works fine for what I use it
for. Originally it had 192 meg's, but the 128M stick went bad.

I'd say go for it, and dump ME as soon as possible. Obviously best would
be a fresh install and not an upgrade.

One other upgrade that might be money well spent at this time would be a
new 7200 rpm harddrive, after rebate's you can get a retail 40 gig for
$40-$50. (I'm assuming it's a 5400 rpm because it's a few years old).

IMO, aside from a mb/cpu upgrade, going from a 5400 to a 7200 rpm hard-
drive is probably the one single upgrade that yields the biggest
perception of increased speed.

As one of the other posters mentioned, XP is waaaayy more stable than
Millenium. Hell, Cybil & Chalres Manson were more stable than ME.
Sometimes I go for 2 or 3 months at a time w/o restarting my computer,
which to me, is amazing since it is a Microsoft O/S.

Regards,

DanS

 

[MikeP]

I've tested a computer with a P-III 450mhz, 160mb of RAM with XP.
It worked decently enough, especially after turning off the eye-candy. For
web surfing,
it ran as good as any other computer. With 512mb, it should run fairly
well.

 

[Alex Nichol]

will a Pentium III 450hz with 512Megs Ram work OK with Xp?
Any Comments ? I presently using WinME and am finding it OK with Office and
Photoshop ! Will it be Better or worse?

I ran XP in the Betas with just such a machine (with in fact less RAM)
and it was fine. If you want multimedia things like DVD movies it would
repay having a video card that does the hard work - I had an ATI Rage
128, but for things like you mention it will do as well as ME in the
applications. You might usefully turn off some of the visual effects
eye-candy. Read Gary Woodruff's article on upgrading to XP at
http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpupgrad.htm

 

[Al Smith]

will a Pentium III 450hz with 512Megs Ram work OK with Xp?

Any Comments ? I presently using WinME and am finding it OK with Office and
Photoshop ! Will it be Better or worse?

That is more than enough computer to run Windows XP, for the most
part. It won't run any better than Windows ME (because an OS is
just an OS), and might be slower for a few things. For example, I
found on my 450 P2 with 384 megs RAM that when I switched from
Windows98 to Windows XP, my DVD video playback and PC game play
was choppy, whereas both had been smooth as silk on Windows98.
Everything else ran fine. XP uses different drivers, and sometimes
they are not as good as the older drivers. People sometimes get
the same kind of problem when upgrading to SP2.