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XP On 8-MHz Pentium With 20 MB RAM

Posted by kdawson on Sun Feb 25, 2007 12:55 AM
from the golden-hourglass dept.
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?"
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  • by aneeshm (862723) on Sunday February 25 2007, @12:57AM (#18140540)
    ....a Beowulf cluster of these!


    Sorry, couldn't resist.
  • My Hardware (Score:5, Funny)

    by abscissa (136568) on Sunday February 25 2007, @12:58AM (#18140542)
    What obscure hardware configurations have you managed to get Windows running on?

    AMD Athlon 3000+ with 1 GB of RAM. A miracle... I know... and STILL I have to reinstall it every couple of months!!
    • Re:My Hardware (Score:4, Interesting)

      by fwarren (579763) on Sunday February 25 2007, @02:32PM (#18144992) Homepage
      Since this seems to be a story about the bare essentials. Once, back in 96 to impress a friend and and show him what this internet thing is about. I went over to his place with a bunch of floppies.

      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.
  • by Timesprout (579035) on Sunday February 25 2007, @12:59AM (#18140554)
    Vista?
  • Not too long ago... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CrkHead (27176) on Sunday February 25 2007, @12:59AM (#18140556)
    When Windows 98 came out the installer also checked the memory. I was doing break/fix in a shop and someone insisted we could "upgrade" their OS without them purchasing RAM. I popped in test RAM, did the install, pulled the RAM and sent it home.

    Don't think we ever heard back from them.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25 2007, @01:01AM (#18140574)
    Or rather, the time I started compiling Gentoo on a 286. It was 2004, and it's still going. I think KDE will be done by 2008.
  • Cruel. (Score:4, Funny)

    by pushing-robot (1037830) on Sunday February 25 2007, @01:04AM (#18140586)
    Isn't this against the Geneva conventions?
  • by creimer (824291) on Sunday February 25 2007, @01:08AM (#18140640) Homepage
    How about installing Windows 3.11 on a 64-bit system?
    • by compwizrd (166184) on Sunday February 25 2007, @02:00AM (#18140958) Homepage
      I found out the hard way that Windows 95 wouldn't run on a p4 2.0, even in safe mode.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A MAJOR accounting firm, 300,000 accountants world wide, that I support their Frame-Relay connectivity, until today, 25th of February, Sunday, 2007, still using windows 3.11 for their computers.

      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
      • I'm calling bullshit on this. A major accounting firm that has no interest in the concept of "business continuity"? Of using unsupported software because it's what their tech support "understands"? What happens as their tech support leaves for other jobs? How many people here can remember the right lines to put into config.sys for configuring memory usage?

        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 have made a 3.5" floppy with DOS 5.0 and Win 3.0. (Most of it anyway; some extras like paint etc wouldn't fit.) There was even enough room left on the floppy for the sysinternals NTFS driver for DOS! I can boot off this floppy and access the HD.

      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.
    • dosbox does that (Score:4, Interesting)

      by twitter (104583) on Sunday February 25 2007, @10:11AM (#18143028) Homepage Journal

      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.

  • by Devil's BSD (562630) on Sunday February 25 2007, @01:09AM (#18140648) Homepage
    You're using a 286? Don't make me laugh. Your Windows boots up in what, a day and a half?
    • "My new computer's got the clocks; it rocks, but it was obsolete before I opened the box"
  • So..... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chas (5144) on Sunday February 25 2007, @01:15AM (#18140686) Homepage Journal
    It's roughly the speed of Vista on a Quad-Core C2 with 4GB of RAM and a 15K rpm RAID-0 array then?

    =)
  • by saturndude (609090) on Sunday February 25 2007, @01:16AM (#18140692) Homepage
    20 Megs of RAM? I thought 640K was supposed to be enough for anyone!!!
  • Mac? (Score:5, Funny)

    by duncanbojangles (787775) on Sunday February 25 2007, @01:17AM (#18140698)
    What obscure hardware configurations have you managed to get Windows running on?

    iMac with an Intel Core Duo 2?
  • Heh... Not bad... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Svartalf (2997) on Sunday February 25 2007, @01:29AM (#18140752) Homepage
    It's comparable to the time I wanted to see just how brutal an environment Windows 95 would install
    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.
  • P120 Laptop (Score:4, Informative)

    by Digital Pizza (855175) on Sunday February 25 2007, @01:31AM (#18140772)
    I installed XP Pro on an old Toshiba Tecra 500CDT with a 120Mhz Pentium, memory maxed out at 144MB (actually a decent amount for that generation of hardware), drive upgraded to 6GB. The machine originally ran Windows 3.11, had a 500MB drive, and 16MB RAM.

    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.
  • Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)

    by KKlaus (1012919) on Sunday February 25 2007, @01:33AM (#18140788)
    So they win an award for biggest waste of time... and somehow I read about it on the front page of Slashdot. Methinks the award was right.

    ZzzZz.
  • Think again (Score:5, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon (326346) on Sunday February 25 2007, @01:45AM (#18140862)
    "They deserve a Golden Hourglass award for 'extreme waste of time.'"

    Uh... I don't think they'd appreciate that - they probably see plenty of hourglasses already.
  • Har. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bmo (77928) on Sunday February 25 2007, @01:55AM (#18140912)
    Windows 3.1 in a window on top of DesqView/X

    In 8MB.

    It worked...

    --
    BMO
  • by MooseMuffin (799896) on Sunday February 25 2007, @02:19AM (#18141074)
    As soon as a new Windows comes out, the old one is suddenly hailed as everything you would ever need, and a marvel of efficient resource usage.
  • by Tawnos (1030370) on Sunday February 25 2007, @02:29AM (#18141132)
    When I worked at a computer repair shop, a woman brought in her system and said it was running slowly. I start the system up and expect there to be a bunch of virii. What I saw next shocked me.

    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.
  • Heh... (Score:3, Funny)

    by rob1980 (941751) on Sunday February 25 2007, @02:43AM (#18141198)
    [an error occurred while processing this directive] The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later. [an error occurred while processing this directive]

    They weren't by any chance hosting their website on that box too were they?
  • by hxnwix (652290) on Sunday February 25 2007, @03:11AM (#18141350) Journal
    It's also their webserver...
  • n00bs (Score:3, Funny)

    by alphamugwump (918799) on Sunday February 25 2007, @03:38AM (#18141464)
    All these n00bs talking about installing something on 64 megs crack me up. When I was a boy, I ran windows 3.1 on my TI-83 -- and was grateful, too!
  • Pffft (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quiet_Desperation (858215) on Sunday February 25 2007, @03:51AM (#18141526)
    I got Linux running on a motorized abacus powered by squirrels.

    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)

    by saibot834 (1061528) on Sunday February 25 2007, @04:34AM (#18141746) Homepage
    Seems like they are using it as their server...
  • by johu (55313) on Sunday February 25 2007, @05:00AM (#18141850)
    D-Link DFL-700 router runs WinXP quite well. It has 266 MHz AMD Geode (486 class CPU) and 64MB RAM. Just connect keyboard and VGA to debug connectors onboard (get pinout from Lanier website - they're actual board manufacturer) and plugin laptop HDD instead of non-standard flash-drive they ship with.
  • Mgz don't matter. (Score:4, Informative)

    by jellomizer (103300) * on Sunday February 25 2007, @07:33AM (#18142344)
    The tough part is getting XP to run on the RAM not the MHZ the lower Mhz just make it slow. If you could go down to 1 Hertz XP should still work. Just be about a billion times slower then it is now.
    • RTFA (Score:4, Informative)

      by Tharkban (877186) on Sunday February 25 2007, @01:42AM (#18140840) Homepage Journal
      That comment was in the article. It was simply included in the summary, not added by /.

      > 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.