Converting my home PC to WIN XP Pro tomorrow. Full load. Thoughts?

[AGR]

My DELL has always been WIN98 Second Edition (past 3 years), and now I'm (finally) changing to XP Pro. We are just now changing at work, so I figured it was about time to change my home PC. From what I have seen so far, I like it. I am not upgrading. This is a full load including MS Office 2003.

My home PC is a P3 600mhz w/256mb ram. I was told it should do fine with XP Pro. I have already backed up all of my files, photos, etc...

Any thoughts?

 

[Snert]

I have mostley found that 512mb or more of ram is helpful to run win xp and office 2003 together

just a thought from me

 

[Low J.]

my wife runs her XP on a Thinkpad 500mhz with 128megs of ram and it runs fine.........she runs Office XP too.....I'm quite pleased actually at how stable it is.....not a crash yet and I'm a hardcore Linux guy....props where props are due.

 

[dj JINX]

I did the switch about 2 months ago, on a Sony Vaio pen 2 800mega with 128 and it ran so slow..........untill last night when i bought 256mb of ram and now wow

 

[fastdrvr23]

My DELL has always been WIN98 Second Edition (past 3 years), and now I'm (finally) changing to XP Pro. We are just now changing at work, so I figured it was about time to change my home PC. From what I have seen so far, I like it. I am not upgrading. This is a full load including MS Office 2003.

My home PC is a P3 600mhz w/256mb ram. I was told it should do fine with XP Pro. I have already backed up all of my files, photos, etc...

Any thoughts?

You should be fine with the setup you describe. We run XP pro on ~550mhz Dell P3's, up to 2.0Ghz P4's here where I work. Most of the boxes here are running 128mb of ram, and they work fine. Office XP, a and couple of in house apps run constantly.

My Box (I'm a developer) is an Dell 866mhz PIII with 256mb of RAM. I've got 16 programs open right now (Microsoft Excel, Outlook, Interdev and some other memory hungry junk) and performance is nice and stable. At home I run XP Pro with 1Gb of RAM on a PIV at 1.6Ghz.

Anyways, good luck!

 

[RyanJayG]

XP runs fine on older PIII's I would also suggest you get another stick of 256MB ram. I think you will probably need it even more than people with P4's since you don't have DDR.

on a good note, XP pro is WAY more stable than 98, and you will have less problems with newer programs than you would with 98.

good luck Greg

 

[got wake?]

disable the .NET and MSN messenger. there is a loop hole in the professional edition that allows pop ups to come in through them. i was told that it's because xp pro was designed for office use, and to have all the computers networked, it made things easier to send files between computers. advertisers found a way to manipulate it to cause popups. after i disabled it, i haven't had a single pop up

 

[Micah]

yeah, right click on my computer - choose manage - then choose services. set the messenger service to disabled. I think it might be called msmsger or something like that. You'll recognize it when you see it.

Oh, and as a performance boost - look up your cpu and find out how much L2 cache it has. Windows XP by default doesn't recognize your L2 cache. To use it - Run REGEDIT.EXE and search for :
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > Control > Session Manager > MemoryManagement

DWORD "SecondLevelDataCache" double click it, select Decimal and type in the amount of cache your CPU's L2 cache is.

This makes a pretty big improvement on performance. Try running a PC benchmark like Mad Onion's or Sandra before and after - you should see an improvement in your score.

 

[Micah]

MUST ......... FIGHT ...... URGE.... TO ........POST ........ HARDWARE ........SPECS......KOOLDINO.... WILL .... MAKE .... FUN ..... OF ..... ME.