XP On 8-MHz Pentium With 20 MB RAM

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?"

P120 Laptop

[Digital Pizza]

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.

RTFA

[Tharkban]

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.

Re:A PC-104 stack

[EvanED]

This was for a college extracurricular project I was working on, a rocket payload [psu.edu]. We were flying a camera to take pictures during the flight, and the camera wouldn't run on anything but XP with their own software that required .Net.

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 launch, so... XP Embedded* it was.

* There should have been a cap E in my previous post

Re:It's all about the Pentiums! - THE VIDEO

[Adeptus_Luminati]

Actually sorry, that was a modified version of the original video...

Here's the actual original video (much funiier): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vaNeaWQoHI&mode=re lated&search= [youtube.com]

Re:last time

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"last time i used thermal compound my cat had silver crap for weeks"

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:Imagine.....

[hummassa]

Wikipedia link [wikipedia.org]
AFAICT, in /. the first was "in California you can always find a party; in Soviet Russia, the Party can always find YOU!"

Re:Hmph...

[tomstdenis]

x86_64 processors fully support 16-bit mode out of the box. You can't execute 16-bit code [natively] from long-mode [64-bit mode] however.

When the cpu first boots though, it's running in 16-bit real mode.

Tom

Mgz don't matter.

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:Heh... Not bad...

[petermgreen]

Was there a fundamental difference between a 386DX and a 486DX
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.

Re:Let's try a different challenge...

[moronoxyd]

There was a know bug in Windows 95 preventing it from booting (well, most of the time) on AMD processors with 300 MHz and more. Microsoft has a patch that fixes that problem. I have been running Win95 on K6/K6-2 CPUs for years.

Re:Worst I've seen

[AngelWind]

Assuming someone bought her the retail version and upgraded her computer (probably after begging to upgrade it and then giving in, but it's generally easy to put the disk in and click upgrade themselves and think everything is normal), they don't generally have the OEM stickers to put on the computer unless they changed that practice these days.

The install keys I've seen in retail versions are on a yellow sticker inside the brochure-like envelope they put in the box which doesn't detach unless you rip it off and superglue it to the case. :)