On Fri, 29 Jun 2007 08:34:38 -0400, "Eric"
"KB" wrote in message

Be sure that your system's compatible with XP. Valuable information can
be found here = http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316639 You'll especially
find the Upgrade Advisor useful =
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/h...g/advisor.mspx

Note that despite their recommendation of 128MB RAM, I'd run, IMHO, 512MB
minimum.

They recommend 128MB? It does run OK on 128MB. I believe it does run on
64MB though.

I can confirm that; saw an XP Pro SP2 box running pretty smoothly on
64M, as well as several running with 32M of 128M "shared with" (stolen
by) SiS onboard graphics. That was helped via CMOS settings to shrink
display RAM use from 32M to 4M.

With 96M, Bart may have trouble starting up, depending what it starts
up with. I've booted Bart in as little as 64M, and there are reports
of "skinny" Bart projects booting in as little as 32M. Once booted,
you can assign a pagefile to Bart, offload it's %Temp% from RAM drive,
and shrink RAM drive to 4M or less.

(Bart PE is a CDR-booting stripped down form of XP that uses a RAM
drive and no page file, so is more sensitive to low RAM)

Of course 512MB is nicer, but so is 2GB. The more RAM you give it, the
smoother it will run. If you do anything that uses much RAM, it will just
use the swap file if it runs out. Just make sure you keep enough free HD
space.

Also, set a suitable page file size, as the default will be way too
small. XP scales pagefile according to RAM, which makes sense for
swallowing crash dumps and fast user switching (a RAM hog) but gets
absurd below 256M RAM. I use 512M for 256M or less RAM.

Same goes for any OS. Win98 can run on 16MB, Vista can run on 1GB maybe
even less. The more you get, the smoother they run.

Win95 is happy in 8M, Win98 in 16M, WinME in 32M, XP in 128M, Vista in
512M. They are happier with more, with double that baseline as sweet;
beyond double that again, you may or may not see a difference,
depending on what you are running.

Big apps on small OSs need more RAM, e.g. a large WinME-era app that
needs 96M in WinME isn't going to magically work in 24M just because
the OS is the original Win95.



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I'm on a ten-year lunch break
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