installing XP,is my system powerfull enough?

[chrisnwuk]

i,m thinking of installing win XP on my computer which is a pentium 3 450mhz,with 384mb memory and 13gig hard drive,a bit of a relic....i,ve got win 98 installed at the moment,would Xp run ok ?i,kve been told it will be very slow..any help would be appreciated.thanks.

[WhatsThisBoxFor?]

It meets the minimum specs, but I don't think it would be very fast. I would be tempted to put Windows 2000 on it, if you want to upgrade. It is a lot less resource hungary, although it might take a while to boot. Why do you want to upgrade? You could stick with 98, although it might be worth an upgrade.

[rjfvillarosa]

XP should run OK on that machine, maybe a little slow during high resource demands, but OK I think. What you should be more concerned with in an old machine like that is compatibility, if you can get hold of an XP disk put it in the machine and when the splash screen comes up, just select compatibility wizard. The wizard will check your machine for known hardware and software incompatibility issues and report it all in a notepad file.

What make and model is the modem? modems are always the most problematical when doing an upgrade of that type.

[RJ]

Windows XP should work fine on that computer. Maybe a tad slow, but not very much, as you got a good amount of RAM there.

RJ

[glc]

450 is fast enough, 384 is enough ram - but I'd be a bit concerned about hard drive space. 13 gigs won't be a lot for many applications and data files. If it has everything you need on it now (that you would have on it with XP) and the hard drive is more than 1/2 full, I'd get a bigger hard drive. It will NOT be as responsive with XP as it is now with 98, but it will be stable. I would personally put Win2000 on it to get the stability without the bloat and eye candy of XP. There are really only 3 areas where Win2000 is deficient - it's a slow bootup, no system restore, and less than optimum game performance. It's not like you will be doing any heavy duty gaming on a 450 anyway and I doubt it has a high end video card. As long as your install of 98 is reasonably clean with no issues, an in place upgrade to 2000 should be smooth as long as you read the upgrade report and take care of the issues it does find. A wipe and clean install, of course, is preferable.

[chrisnwuk]

thanks for the reply,s guys, very helpful,i,m thinking of getting a new digital camera and most of the new ones dont seem to work on win98 ,hence thinking of XP, i,m on broadband with a alcatel speed touch broad band modem,

[rjfvillarosa]

Originally Posted by chrisnwuk thanks for the reply,s guys, very helpful,i,m thinking of getting a new digital camera and most of the new ones dont seem to work on win98 ,hence thinking of XP, i,m on broadband with a alcatel speed touch broad band modem,

Thats good at least you can cross that off your list of potential problems.

[glc]

If you are going to get a digicam, you definitely need a bigger hard drive unless you are going to methodically burn your pics to CD's for storage. They add up quick.

[Zim0n]

it wood work fine

Zim0n

[noob_slayer]

i would reccomend not just upgrading to winxp but also to upgrade your entire computer while you are at it

--Noob Slayer--

[JTH]

You should be able to run XP on that machine without too many issues. In fact, I don't even think you'll even find it that slow (maybe just a bit). Be warned, though, that the XP install takes about 2.3 gb so make sure you'll have enough space on your HDD to load all your programs as well as that (with at least 1-2gb to spare if possible).

[scomac]

If you do upgrade to XP, you can always use the classic interface without the rounded corners, fades, etc... That will make a difference. A friend of mine has an older laptop that has XP on it, and I changed over to the classic interface and noticed a pretty big difference in how it ran.

Scomac

[Hi Ho]

I run XP on my other PC (K6 533mhz, 256 MB RAM, 60 GB HDD) and it runs fine. I have the eye candy on. I have turned it off before but it made no difference.

[rcvalencia9]

RAM is the major issue on win xp. win xp will work fine in your PC but after installing softwares that eat a lot of RAM and that run on the background (e.g. virus scanners, firewalls etc.), you will notice a big difference on speed and stability. you have 384 MB and i think it will be ok, but dont expect it to be GREAT.

Another issue is the drivers for your hardwares. make sure that there is an available update for your hardwares.

I have been installing win xp pro on many of my friends' pcs. upgrade from win 98, but having problem with their modem drivers. its not digitally signed and no available update for modem drivers.

[palloco]

An important point is also the video card. XP does not support 3dfx cards

[JTH]

Hmmm... what are 3dfx cards?

[glc]

3dfx "Voodoo" - used to be the gamer's choice.

They are supported with native drivers in XP.

[The_YongGrand]

I can run Windows XP on a AMD K6-2 450MHz with 112MB RAM... Good enough but a bit laggy, and I really cannot play games on it... The only thing I can do is surfing the net, and doing word applications... More RAM the better... But for sure a Pentium 3 450 w/ 192MB RAM is going to work better than mine...

[palloco]

3dfx cards are not really supported. I have one myself and when installed XP although it appeared correctly that I had a voodoo 3 3000 it worked as if I had a generic vga driver. I could not install monitor driver and no matter which drivers I used, in hardware manager it said that the system did not have enough resources to deal with the video card. K6-3 400, with 256 mb RAM. It works perfectly with either w98se or w2000.
In fact when you go to microsoft website and look for hardware supported for their OS you will find 3dfx cards in both w98 and w2000, but not in XP, 2003 ...

[thefultonhow]

Originally Posted by chrisnwuk i,m thinking of installing win XP on my computer which is a pentium 3 450mhz,with 384mb memory and 13gig hard drive,a bit of a relic....i,ve got win 98 installed at the moment,would Xp run ok ?i,kve been told it will be very slow..any help would be appreciated.thanks.

I have experience with XP on several old computers:

PII 400, 512 MB RAM, 13 GB HDD -- runs well, albeit a bit slow.
PII 450, 256 MB RAM, 13 GB HDD -- same thing. I found that the 400 MHz machine ran XP better because it has more RAM
PIII 550, 320 MB RAM, 13 GB hard drive -- runs like a charm.

On all three I turned off all animations, shadows, styles, etc. in the System control panel and optimized services. Hard drive space was an issue on the first two because they were my dad's and my brother's, respectively, and they both wanted to store a bunch of MP3s. The other one was my grandmother's and her Word, Excel, and Quicken documents fit quite well, thank you!

Basically, your system would run XP just fine, although if I were you I would probably buy a bigger hard drive for storage.

With that said, when I handed down my PIII 1 GHz 512 MB system to my dad and my P4 2.4 GHz 512 MB system to my brother, they both noticed a fairly big difference in terms of performance.