Legacy computer, winFLP or win2000?

[dkarko]

I have an old system here, its a P2 Celeron @ 400 with only 64MBs of SDRAM (both banks occupied, i might look for some more but not now).
It was used at the office i was working and they don't need it anymore, so i want to fix it and give it to a friend.
Currently it has windows 95!(yup.. and the greek edition.. back then localized version, at least here, were seriously buggy). Strangely enough after all these years the OS still works, no bsods, but it feels much slower than it should be.
Anyway, i should install a better OS!
So windows2000 pro needs at least 32mbs of ram (64 recommended) and winflp 64min (128 recommended).
Do you think i should go for winFLP? Thus keeping the software more up to date?
Furthermore, any ideas for a really lightweight webbrowser?

Thanks

[Zelig]

Windows 2000 if you've got access, easier on resources, and WinFLP is only available to corporations through software assurance.

Opera works well as a browser.

Personally, I'd look at getting something faster, something like a 1GHz system with 512MB of ram goes for around $50 at most, and is far more usable.

[dkarko]

It would definately be more useful, but the thing is that i have it already, besides they only need it as a starter. I was seriously thinking about searching for some old sdram dimms, but lets see how it copes first (and god it needs alot of cleaning. it's as dusted inside as a pc can be)
I'll give win2000 a try.

Thanks!

[dkarko]

Well i finally went for XP sp1 plus lots of tweaks. I didn't tweak themes since i wanted it to look friendly. I also managed to upgrade it to 96mb of ram. It's running pretty smooth, i didn't believe it was possible. It boots up with ~45mb ram usage (70mb is ram+vm in the picture). It's also loaded with light apps like abiword, pidgin and foxit reader.
For protection i made a restricted user account + i integrated mcafee's command line scanner (free,but manual updates and no active protection) to the shell (right click -> scan files)

[stev]

Sine the machine is running XP, your best be is to de-tune the Visual Effects found under Control Panel > System Properties > Advanced tab > Visual Effects. Then click the bullet of Adjust for best performance.

Only two things in the main list need to be highlighted for real use. The first being slider common buttons and the other for dragging contents.

You can even keep the Win98SE look in XP. It really saves on memory resource under the display options.

For that machine to run XP without taxing the HDD to death, it needs at least 128Mb RAM or better.

I have XP-SP2 running on a Dell GX1 450Mhz Intel slot card CPU. It has 256Mb RAM and is very quick running on the basic tasks.

Then there is the Compaq AMD Chomper 500Mhz Mid-tower running XP-SP2 with 768Mb RAM.

To bad these machines can't crank out the WUs for F@H all that well. It costs money keeping those older machines PSUs running 24/7.

[dkarko]

You've got a point. Well pretty much i disabled most of the visual effects. I just left Luna on cause i wanted it to look pleasant (don't remember about the slider buttons). Actually i disabled the "show contents while dragging". The system has ancient onboard gfx and it wasn't coping with that well at all. Moving windows was not smooth at all. I believe they won't be using internet, thankfully cause Avant is not as lightweight as i expected, in fact i found out (on my laptop that's lacking memory too, only 256mbs) that a tweaked Opera runs using much less ram.
As long as they are using one of these apps at a time i hope it stays responsive.

My experiment with win2000 had gone well, till i did the mistake to install an antivirus . The system got nuked. It went from fast boot + responsive to a total crawl and waste of space. Well then i found a localized version of xp sp1, which is good since they don't speak any english, so i switched to it.

I think i might be able to add some ram int he future. Few systems with sdram will be retired, i hope i can find a 64mb or 128 stick in them.