192MB RAM and Windows XP

[grss1982]

Re: 192MB RAM and Windows XP

A friend asked about this today. He has a laptop which he wants to use for school for word processing and light internet usage. It currently has Windows 98 and he has a copy of Windows XP SP2 which he wants to install on the laptop. Apparently Windows 98 won't let him log onto the school portal as the portal requires a Windows XP based PC. His laptop is a Dell Latitude C600 with a PIII 700Mhz CPU, 192MB PC100 RAM, 20GB Hard drive, ATi M3 8MB graphics card and a DVD drive.
I wasn't sure what to say when he wanted XP on a laptop with 192MB of RAM. I used to run XP off a PII 350 with 160MB RAM and that was ok, wasn't too bad but this was like 3 years ago. So should XP be installed on a PC with 192MB of RAM?

Normally I would define 256MB of RAM as suitable for XP and internet usage, but in this case I'm not sure.

Thanks.

Have you ever heard of TinyXP? Yeah its WAREZ but if I remember correctly it uses nlite, and thus you could have a TinyXp version of your friend's Windows XP. There was even a TinyXP guide floating around the net.

TinyXp even got a review...well sort of:
http://apcmag.com/pirated_windows_mo...real_thing.htm

ALSO..I did find the TinyXP Guide in my computer that I downloaded a long time ago.

http://rapidshare.com/files/21704059...GUIDE.rar.html

NOTE: Use the exact version of the software stated in the guide.

I don't know how much light it is but I'm using Antivir since I discovered it 6 or 7 years ago and till now I have not problem at all and moreover it is free.
I have installed it also on not very fast PC (P3 700Mhz - P3 500MHz) and was not so heavy for them.

Ciao
Gianni

+1

Using Avira here as well.

[NxB]

Re: 192MB RAM and Windows XP

TinyXP would be the winner unless you want linux or win2k.

[zandrax]

Re: 192MB RAM and Windows XP

@ zandrax: I checked now on my PC how much RAM Antivir eats, and if I'm not wrong, it is around 8MB (avguard.exe + avgnt.exe).

If I open the GUI it takes 10MB more (avcenter.exe).

Am I missing something?

By default Task Manager shows you only the physical ram your app is using for both its own files (exe and libraries) and for shared elements (usually system dlls): you count the shared libraries more than once and miss the whole memory (both ram and virtual memory a.k.a. "swap file") used by the program and its own libraries, the so-called Private Bytes on XP's Task Manager. If you enable the Private Byte column, you'll discover avguard.exe needs about 55 MB, sched.exe 3.8 and avgnt 2.5: their sum is roughly 60 MB and this is the memory is loaded at startup.
Virtaul Size is memory (ram + virtual memory) required by the program for past and future use: values are usually big (hundreds of MB) because any programs ask in advance for memory it may need in future and some badly written apps "forget" to relese it once it's no more required (this is a memory leak), but it's useful only when dealing with memory leaks or huge swapping.

@ Stevo:
Don't turn to 2000 unless you're forced to: try reducing XP's footprint with nLite. Follow this guide and don't remove any driver you aren't sure.

Zandrax


Zandrax

[Gianni]

Re: 192MB RAM and Windows XP

Thanks jpdoe and zandrax

I didn't know the options of Task Manager, I see now that maximum memory used by avgnt.exe is 48MB, by avguard.exe is 64.5MB.
If I open the GUI (avcenter.exe) it eats 53MB peak.

Ciao
Gianni

[Logistics]

Re: 192MB RAM and Windows XP

I just use Kaspersky's online scanner when I download files I'm not certain about.

If the battery on the laptop doesn't work very well, anymore and you're always running off the power-block, anyway I would install xp with no ACPI. You lose hibernation and and soft-off, but you increase responsiveness a bit.

[bgavin]

Re: 192MB RAM and Windows XP

...anyway I would install xp with no ACPI. You lose hibernation and and soft-off, but you increase responsiveness a bit.

Interesting hypothesis.

I can't find anything to substantiate nor deny this.
Process Explorer doesn't reveal anything that looks to tie into ACPI.

In my system, System Idle and DPCs take the most system time.
This is followed by McAfee Enterprise, which is known to be a hog for both cycles and resources.

Disabling unnecessary services recovers about 20~50mb, depending upon how radical you go. I've been able to pare down an XP Pro installation to about 49mb, but this is awfully bare bones.

[Logistics]

Re: 192MB RAM and Windows XP

This has been tried by many games, including myself to increase fps in games. It works every time. I almost always get an 8-10 fps increase, depending on the game of course, and sometimes it's only about a 3-4 fps increase. It was my understanding that it just releives XP of all of it's IRQ-sharing bs that it likes to do in ACPI mode. I don't know the ins-n-outs of exactly why it works, it just does in practice.

The funny thing about this thread is that I did exactly this on a friends C600 a while back which had a pretty useless battery and had to be hooked up to the wall adapater all the time. Ran okay with an original WinXP install with no service packs, but had to scour for good packages of appropriate drivers for it's hardware. If those things allow you to then I'm sure I disabled anything useless like COM/LPT ports, and set it up using a slimmed down Windows Classic appearance.

I still have the driver files I downloaded for it. File-names are: C600_A23.EXE, M3XUA14I.EXE and R54236.EXE

[jpdoe]

Re: 192MB RAM and Windows XP

I would guess the fps increase you're getting with ACPI disabled has to do with the fact that on some machines, enabling ACPI means having a lot of devices banded together on a single IRQ. I don't remember why this is done, but it means that for each IRQ request the CPU receives from this overloaded IRQ, it has to find out which of the devices using this IRQ is the culprit.

[bgavin]

Re: 192MB RAM and Windows XP

Before protected mode came along, I did a lot of ASM coding in the IRQ arena. This was mostly serial port processing, but the game is the same.

Every IRQ requires a state change, and the required register/stack pushes. This seems trivial on a fast machine, but Windows does an enormous amount of context switching. This adds up.

I don't game, so I'm clueless as to ACPI reducing FPS. I will take your word for it, as it seems logical. The more complex the system, the slower it runs.

In protected mode, there are many more IRQ available than in real mode. Assigning a unique IRQ to each hardware requirement eliminates the code that determines who is ringing the bell. This happens at every interrupt, so the code execution savings are significant.

I wrote EZ-Tweak to provide a lower impact means of reducing wasted cycles by disabling services. My only gripe with non-ACPI mode is the customer impact. They will whine like crazy if the machine won't shut itself off. This is a destructive option, because it requires a fresh rebuild/install to add or remove ACPI functions.

All of this seems like overkill when it is easier to install more ram.
Or replace the machine.