Noel Paton wrote:
"Alias" wrote in message
...
I wrote:

Would a AMD Athlon 800 with 256 RAM be able to handle W2K? I have XP Pro
on it now and it's a bit slow opening programs.

Alias
Noel Paton replied:

Should be OK, Alias - but can't you put another 256MB on it?
If I could, I would and leave XP on it. It was originally an ASUS board
but HP messed with and removed one of the RAM slots, leaving two when
there should be three. I have tried two 256s and no joy. I use one of
either of the 256s, it works. If I use two 128s, it works. If I use one
256 and one 128, no joy. Do you think the performance would be better with
W2K than XP Pro?

I also have a 5400 rpm IDE hard drive on it. Would putting a 7200 on it
improve performance?


Yeah - the overheads in Win2K are a lot less than they are in XP.
I know the Min spec in XP is supposed to be 128MB - but I've only ever seen
1 machine running that level - and it was a snail, despite having a decent
cpu...adding another 128MB made it acceptable, but not fast (the owner
couldn't afford to go to 512MB).
OTOH, Win 2K min spec is 64MB, IIRC - and it runs very happily on my
PII400/384MB, and faster than XP did at the same spec.

As far as the HD speed is concerned, yes, if there's significant
fileswapping going on, then putting a higher-spec HD in would help that
along nicely - particularly if it has a nice big onboard cache.

However...... if there are already problems on the motherboard, you be want
to start thinking in terms of replacing that - as it may simply be the first
of a cascade of problems. If you can replace the MB now, with a 'perfect'
one, then you may prevent damage do other elements later when/if the MB does
finally give up the ghost.


Problem with replacing the MB is that the processor is one of those big
ones and motherboards that use that type of CPUs aren't being made
anymore. If I were to replace the mother board, I would also put a
better processor on. I can afford another hard drive, but not another
MB, processor and the RAM that processor would need. It isn't a primary
computer but a back up computer. My primary has AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 1
gig of 333 RAM, etc. and it runs XP Pro excellently.

Alias