XP On 8-MHz Pentium With 20 MB RAM 410
swehack writes "The guys over at winhistory.de managed to get their Windows XP Professional running on a very minimal box: an Intel Pentium clocked down to 8 MHz with 20 MB of RAM. (The installer won't work with less than 64 MB, but after installing you can remove memory.) The link has plenty of pictures of their progress in achieving this dubious milestone. They deserve a Golden Hourglass award for 'extreme waste of time.' What obscure hardware configurations have you managed to get Windows running on?"
Imagine..... (Score:4, Funny)
Sorry, couldn't resist.
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Re:Imagine..... (Score:5, Funny)
I dunno... Gentoo has been around for a long time... just welcoming them now?
(I run Gentoo)
Re:Imagine..... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Imagine..... (Score:5, Informative)
AFAICT, in
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Soviet_Russia [wikipedia.org]
What I don't get is, how come the entire planet seems to be packed with people who suffer from Acute Sparetime Overload Disorder?
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Hey! That's slashdot!
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Urge to kill you... fighting with... urge to laugh...
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So, were's the license then? (Score:5, Funny)
My Hardware (Score:5, Funny)
AMD Athlon 3000+ with 1 GB of RAM. A miracle... I know... and STILL I have to reinstall it every couple of months!!
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Dammit *I* was going to make that joke. How dare you? , you
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I've changed RAM, sound cards, several video cards, monitors, power supplies, countless perip
Re:My Hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
I had a local dialup account. He had some old computer parts:
1. Low end VGA monitor
2. VGA card capable of 16 colors at 640x480
3. 2 Megs of Ram
4. 20 Meg Hard Drive
5. 1200 baud modem
6. 1.2m floppy dirve
7. A 386-SX motherboard with a lowend 16hmz CPU
On this sweet box, I was able to install a striped down DOS 6.22, a bare install of Windows 3.11, trumpet winsock (1.x series I belive), and the Opera Web Browser (3.x) series.
I had to practically perform a seance to get MEMMAKER to give the MGA adapter memory over for use to bump the DOS 640k limit.
It was painful, but I was able to get a graphic dial up connection at 1200 baud, 16 color 640x480 resolution and show my friend this brave new world of the internet.
Of course this system operated with the rock soild reliability we have all come to know and trust from Mircosoft.
The sad thing is. It probably took less time to build this box AND install all the software than it takes to do a VISTA install nowdays.
Yes but does it run (Score:5, Funny)
Not too long ago... (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't think we ever heard back from them.
Re:Not too long ago... (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of the time I compiled Gentoo on a 286 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Reminds me of the time I compiled Gentoo on a 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah, I deserved that one.
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Cruel. (Score:4, Funny)
Just like 'enemy combatants' (Score:5, Funny)
Sadly, computers don't have rights, so moral arguments aside, I'm afraid it's quite legal to run Windows on them.
Just not legal (Score:2)
It is just illegal to make somebody use it, it is Cruel and Unusual Punishment. If the it is in the workplace, it is an illegal work environment.
Re:Just not legal (Score:4, Funny)
Let's try a different challenge... (Score:5, Funny)
Hmph... (Score:2)
compatibility there to support those the way they expect to enough to sort of run.
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Indeed -- you can. And often you have to, to upgrade BIOSs and firmwares and such.
I was thinking that maybe the Itanium [wikipedia.org] couldn't run 16 bit code -- but apparently it has no trouble doing it -- it just does it really slowly. The Itanium 2 [wikipedia.org] would seem to have gotten rid of the x86 compatibility in hardware (and moved it to software instead) so I don't see how it could run DOS. But all of the x86_64 cpus out there should have no trouble running DOS programs.
Re:Hmph... (Score:4, Informative)
When the cpu first boots though, it's running in 16-bit real mode.
Tom
Re:Hmph... (Score:5, Interesting)
(Microsoft Great Plains version 9 if anyone cares)
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Not completely. The 64 bit CPUs are fully backward compatible. Some of the 16 bit support was dropped from the 64 bit mode. But the CPU still starts up in 16 bit mode, and much of the BIOS is 16 bit code. From there you can switch to 32 bit mode and only then can you switch to 64 bit mode. Once you are in 64 bit mode a few features are missing, you don't have any virtual 86 mode, and segmentation doesn't apply to 64 bit code. You can still run 32 bit c
Re:Let's try a different challenge... (Score:4, Funny)
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They constantly upgrade their hardware (as soon as warrenty expires on the hardeware, they start selling it, auction style, for the book value of $1.00). Yet they still run windows 3.11. Eventhough that Microsoft told them that they will no longer support it. They simply think that it works fine for filling spreadshe
Re:Let's try a different challenge... (Score:4, Interesting)
And I'm curious as to which Windows 3.11 system it is that can run Oracle? Or do they run a newer version of Windows (or heaven forbid, gasp, Unix) for it? In which case, what happened to all that "glitz and glam" that they so vehemently shunned?
I'm not buying it.
I already did that (Score:3, Funny)
I've originally planned to use it as a recovery disk for systems that won't boot. But I've since found a much better use for it: pranks. There's nothing like watching someone jump when Windows 3 boots on their brand new Dell.
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Some of these files, can't remember which, I think they came from the win98 installer, making them smaller. It can't run DOS apps, unfortunately.
If anyone can make Windows 3.1 *with* DOS support fit onto a 1.44 MB floppy, I'd like to see it.
-uso.
dosbox does that (Score:4, Interesting)
You can run win 3.1 on dosbox. I imagine there's a 64 bit port in Debian and elsewhere. With a fast enough machine, it should be about as quick as it ever was. It's kind of slow on a 1GHz class 32bit cpu.
windows95 (Score:2)
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I did it with a PC Chips M571 [m571.com] mobo.
It's all about the Pentiums! (Score:5, Funny)
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Here's the actual original video (much funiier): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vaNeaWQoHI&mode=r
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ROFL
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LOL. Only a complete moron would do that. Anybody who knows anything would have used a 486.
Speaking of which
There's an underlying irony to the goofy exercise described in the article. Once upon a time, the business world ran just fine on DOS and 3/486 machines. I remember one of my first real jobs was working as a lowly wordprocessor in an international law firm. Working up a 500 page prospectus was something I
Obscure hardware configurations (Score:2)
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Actually, it worked pretty well. I had X and OpenLook running and was able to run a Netrek server with 19 robot players and myself on a regular Netrek client. That's not bad going, given that Netrek was not the most elegant of programs. (Hell,
So..... (Score:5, Funny)
=)
Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Mac? (Score:5, Funny)
iMac with an Intel Core Duo 2?
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That Slashdot Bias, Again (Score:2, Interesting)
They deserve a Golden Hourglass award for 'extreme waste of time.'
Not that I ever expect much of anything from the Slashdot editors, but having this comment is just stupid. If someone were to get some Linux distro working on a much weaker box than we're used to seeing it on, it wouldn't be labeled an "extreme waste of time." When a Linux distro is compacted enough to conveniently fit on a flash drive, it's not an extreme waste of time (though yes I get how something like this is definitely more useful). But this, because it's Windows, has to be an extreme waste of tim
RTFA (Score:4, Informative)
> But until this [sic] the record of the lamest XP PC goes from Berlin (Germany) to Vienna (Austria).
> {Image} The golden Sandclock Award
> {Image} For extreme waste of time.
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No, it's not. All they did was plug in old hardware and try to install it. No limitation of size, no optimization of anything. Just simple testing of "how slow can you go?"
The Linux comparison would be picking up Linux at the store, and seeing how low a system you could put it on.
(The MS c
Heh... Not bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
and still "run". I had this old narfy 386sx-16 "laptop" with 16Mb of RAM and 120Mb of HD. I installed
it with compression out of the gate and the thing just went in there. It wasn't happy with me, but
it was usable for very small values of "usable" and it ran stuff like Delphi if you were patient for
very large values of "patient" as it swap-thrashed itself to death doing what I asked of it.
It still worked. I was impressed. Wasn't USEFUL, mind.
This falls under the same category.
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Intels use of the terms DX and SX is a bit confusing
386SX-16 bit external bus, no internal floating point unit
386DX-32 bit external bus, no internal floating point unit
486SX-32 bit external bus, no internal floating point unit
486DX-32 bit external bus, internal floating point unit
there were also some other fairly major architectural changes between 386 and 486 at least according to wikipedia.
8MB, or even less, routine for Win 95 (Score:2)
P120 Laptop (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft dropped support for the Tecra's Chips&Technologies video chipset, so I used the driver from Win2K; also didn't support acceleration at 24-bit (worked but with pretty slow screen drawing) so set it to 16-bit color, worked great.
Machine has a CDROM but BIOS won't boot from it so I had to boot the WinXP install floppies which you have to download from Microsoft; different set of disks for XP Pro and XP Home.
Not going to win any speed records, but quite useable.
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Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
ZzzZz.
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I read it out of morbid curiousity because I can't stand running Windows XP on even a Pentium 4; too long from POST to being able to actually open an application.
Think again (Score:5, Funny)
Uh... I don't think they'd appreciate that - they probably see plenty of hourglasses already.
Har. (Score:3, Interesting)
In 8MB.
It worked...
--
BMO
Back in the day... (Score:2)
It was Ok for the first little bit. After a month or so though, it started to go downhill. At one point, I restarted it when I woke up in the morning, and
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It installed, but left less than 100MB left on the partition. After the final reboot, it sucked up the last bit of di
Gotta love it... (Score:5, Funny)
I bought a 386 for like, $10. (Score:2)
Or, it may have been given to me as part of some other deal. Kinad hazy on the whole thing now... I canabalized it for parts (case, CD-ROM, hard drive, etc. were all still worth something) but before I did that, I tried installing Windows 95 just for the heck of it, and it worked. That box had 4 megs of ram I think, I might have had to add some. I don't remember how big the hard drive was. I understand it might not have worked if I hadn't had a later model 386, something to do with the co-processor IIRC
Worst I've seen (Score:5, Funny)
After 30 minutes I'm looking at the default windows XP desktop. Immediately I know this is an illegal install, as the system had no sticker on it, and it looked too old to have had WinXP reasonably on it. I decide to see what service pack she's running, so I right click on my computer, click properties...and almost crap my pants. The system was running on a Cyrix M5 with 48MB of RAM. There were no service packs installed. She had about 30 worms installed and running on her system.
Sometimes, late at night, I wake up in a cold sweat thinking about the horror of such a system.
Cyrix M5 (Score:2, Insightful)
Kids today have it easy, back in my day you just might have had to get a cyrix.
Heh... (Score:3, Funny)
They weren't by any chance hosting their website on that box too were they?
Waste of time (Score:2)
They do? In fact this is still slightly more intellectually stimulating than reading and posting on
apparently that system pulls double duty... (Score:3, Funny)
n00bs (Score:3, Funny)
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my first job was as an operator on big iron, not IBM
To start the machine from cold involved
Power on CPU, Card reader, Tape drives, Floppy drives, Disk Drives, Network interface and Line printers
Load 1st card deck to load floppy firmware
Load 2nd card deck to load tape firmware
Load Disk firmware from floppy
Load NIC firmware from tape
Pffft (Score:5, Funny)
Then I got Windows CE running on an ancient Mayan claendar.
Then, utilizing quantum states, I got Mac OS 9 running on a single electron.
I rule! Bow to me! Argh!
Seems like (Score:5, Funny)
D-Link DFL-700 router (Score:4, Interesting)
Mgz don't matter. (Score:4, Informative)
Windows Server 2003 on a-synchronous cpus (Score:3, Interesting)
You read that right.
One of the Athlon MP 2400s in my box died, and I didn't have a spare. I did have a spare Athlon XP-m 2400, so I decided to try it. Unfortunately mobile cpus boot at their lowest speed, so my server had one 2GHz cpu and one 600MHz cpu in MP...
It worked perfectly, except for programs that tried to use cpu cycle counters to measure time. Eg. I started my Counter-Strike server and it was confused as to whether it had been on for 1 minute or 2 hours.
Oddball install circa 1990 (Score:3, Interesting)
Rewind to 1990. Install Windows 3.0 on your Banyan VINES file server. Then prepare a boot floppy with DOS, the Banyan drivers and nothing else. Remove the hard drive from a 386SX with 4MB RAM, boot said machine with the floppy and start Windows from the file server.
In this configuration, Windows will happily page to the floppy, that being the only local storage available.
Mac community beat them to it (Score:3, Interesting)
These people are way behind the curve. The Mac community did this years ago [mactalk.com.au], running OS X 10.3 on an old 25 MHz Mac.
Because of the software emulation required to run the PowerPC code on a 68k machine, the person who did the experiment estimated that booting up should take about 7 days. :-)
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Never a more curious juxtaposition of terms.
Why?
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It didn't work all that well, and it was a pain to get set up, and I definitely should have said "trying to do this with this equipment is stupid" but that was already the second camera I was given (the first didn't work at all) after being brought on with less than a year to la
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Re:last time (Score:5, Informative)
There's a warning on the thermal compound that you shouldn't take it internally. Now I realize it wasn't specific enough to mention cats....
Re:last time (Score:5, Funny)
Even if it did, who's going to teach the cats to read?
Re:last time (Score:4, Funny)
Re:last time (Score:5, Funny)
Well, you didn't know that before you read it, did you?
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Now. XP has significantly higher "minimum" specs tha