Help woth all the various stripped down versions of XP

[Kenny_McCormic]

I need something that will run on a 400mhz K6 with 220 megs of ram and a 4 gig HDD with all the drivers and plug and play stuff that XP comes with. While still running faster than a heavily upgraded and tweaked windows 98. Does such a thing exist?

[nitro2k01]

Windows 2000 might actually do it for you.
You don't get the skinning of XP of course, but you don't want that either.

[jaimegmr]

Download a program called nLite and use that to strip down your Windows XP CD of any programs/drivers/features/services you don't want or need. You can get a very slim version of windows that uses less memory than normal that way.

[bicostp]

I need something that will run on a 400mhz K6 with 220 megs of ram and a 4 gig HDD with all the drivers and plug and play stuff that XP comes with. While still running faster than a heavily upgraded and tweaked windows 98. Does such a thing exist?

XP will run on that just fine if you disable themes and all the interface effects (drop shadows, anti-aliasing, etc).

nLite and XPlite are two programs you can use to make a smaller version of XP. nLite lets you make a customized install disc, while XPlite is a utility that removes crap after you install.

<a href="http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm">Here</a> is a configuration guide which will help you determine which Windows services can be disabled. (Less services running = faster with less RAM.)

If you have a spare, scrap hard drive (even an old 2 gig drive), install it on the other IDE bus (not the one your main drive is on), and devote the whole thing to swap space. It's not as good as filling the machine with real RAM, but it can help a little. (Since it says 220, it might be using some memory for VRAM. Got a graphics card you can throw in there?)

Since you only have 4 gigs of drive space to play with, your best bet is an nLite disc. Get rid of things like the Windows Tour, Messenger, themes and wallpaper, sample media, image acquisition (TWAIN), DirectX (since I doubt this will be used for games), and most of the drivers.

(if you get rid of the onboard driver cache, you will need the disc to install devices, so at least leave the USB Mass Storage and USB human interface device drivers so thumbdrives and game controllers will really be plug-and-play).

Your main limitation here is hard drive space, not computing power. (I've run XP on a Pentium 166 with 128 MB of RAM before. It's not pretty but it works.)

Also, try running the <a href="http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... ">Autoruns utility</a> to see what's loading at boot time. (MSconfig does the same thing but this is far more extensive.)

[Kenny_McCormic]

No spare HDD and I dont have a spare grphics card that works (warped from overheating even though i had a 80mm fan devoted just to cooling the damn thing). Had 90 megs when i got it, addded a 128 stick I had lying around. Thanks for the advice.

[jaimegmr]

You said the computer has 220MB of memory but that is only what Windows sees. In reality, it has 256MB of memory but 32MB are being used for onboard video and 4MB are being used by something else. Since onboard video cards are not good for gaming anyway, you might as well go into the BIOS and lower the amount of memory dedicated to video as low as the BIOS will let you set it, maybe 4MB, 8MB, or 16MB. This way Windows will have more memory available to use.

[Kenny_McCormic]

No its 32+64+128 which is 224, it reads 220 though. The onboarde video stuf is not adjustable. Having issues with nlite so im going with XPlite.

[Bibin]

It seems to be taking 4MB for VRAM.