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best os for a p166?

X

xmurderx

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 10, 2003
Messages
183
I just aquired a very old laptop that I will probley be giving to my very young sister to beatup/ use for homework, what is a good operating system? I would really like to use something a bit newer but i geuss anything will do. GUI is a must. Any suggestions?
 
DOS 3.1
Windows 95
Maybe Windows 98

Thats it. I belive Win2000 needs a faster processor. How much RAM does it have?
 
ComputerBox34 said:
DOS 3.1
Windows 95
Maybe Windows 98

Thats it. I belive Win2000 needs a faster processor. How much RAM does it have?
Click to expand...
I'd go with win98 if you have 32 mb of RAM or more. I ran win98 on a NEC 75mhz laptop with 48mb of ram and it was fine.... slow but good word processor, etc.
 
its got 80mb of ram

is there a way I could make the gui in windows 98 look more modern?
 
xmurderx said:
its got 80mb of ram

is there a way I could make the gui in windows 98 look more modern?
Click to expand...

you could use a skin program like windowblinds but then it would slooooooooow down.
 
dariob said:
you could use a skin program like windowblinds but then it would slooooooooow down.
Click to expand...

:(

ok

thanks for all the replys :)

I did my googling but i asked here in case thier was super fast os with an awsome gui that could run on a slow computer.
 
Agreed... put a nice background on it and call it a day.
 
can't believe no one suggested linux.
you want easy to use? go for linspire...haha. at least it's still linux, sort of.
 
Win98 or 98SE. Best balance of features vs bloat for you machine.

Current Linux Distro's using a GUI like gnome need more hardware than you have for good performance, but they will work ok though. My Fedora Core 3 box uses 107MB RAM after boot running gnome and FTP and Samba.
 
nylint said:
can't believe no one suggested linux.
you want easy to use? go for linspire...haha. at least it's still linux, sort of.
Click to expand...


Agreed. Linux up that old PC :-D
 
abudhu said:
Agreed. Linux up that old PC :-D
Click to expand...

just don't put gnome or kde on that laptop. new releases will assume you have much better hardware than what you are pimping.

better yet, find some vintage iso's of mandrake or redhat (6.x or 7.x) and install from there. Use blackbox or icewm for window managers.

you should be able to get a browser, instant messenger, word processor (abiword- not openoffice), and spreadsheet (gnumeric - not openoffice). openoffice is pretty bloated for your hardware.
 
Met-AL said:
Win98 or 98SE. Best balance of features vs bloat for you machine.

Current Linux Distro's using a GUI like gnome need more hardware than you have for good performance, but they will work ok though. My Fedora Core 3 box uses 107MB RAM after boot running gnome and FTP and Samba.
Click to expand...
Agreed. Unless you use an extremely lightweight Linux GUI, Win98SE is the best option.

A while back I was forced to use a P166 with 24 MB of RAM for a couple of weeks while my main system was down. I can actually look back and say that I somewhat enjoyed using this system. Sure, you can't play many games on it, and videos run choppy, if at all, but I could browse the internet on it, type documents (wordpad) and listen to music (Winamp).

None of the mainstream Linux distros can come close to Win98SE in this regard ;)
 
Damn Small Linux

only 50mb in size!!!!111
u_DR_K13
 
windows 98 would probably be the easiest, linux would probably be the fastest. a default install of linux, as has been mentioned many times already, would definitely NOT be fast, but some of the older distros can have you pulling your hair out trying to just get through the install if it doesn't outright detect your laptop hardware.

that being said, yours is probably old enough that it should do fine, and i know you can tweak it out enough to run plenty fast if you are so inclined to do the reading.

i have to concur though, windows 98 would have you up and running and doing what you want to do faster than any other solution. good luck finding drivers!
 
the choices, in my opinion from least ram usage to most.

DOS 6.22 with win 3.11
freeBSD-mini (try to find a smaller / efficient WM for it)
win 95A
win 95B
win 98SE
win2000pro (I ran it on a P90 with 128MB ram, if you have 112+ it runs awesome, just leave it running when you can cuz it takes a bit to start up. or put a new fast HD in it and itll start snappy, its, amazingly, very efficient on older systems, except it takes more RAM)
 
LadyJaqie said:
win2000pro (I ran it on a P90 with 128MB ram, if you have 112+ it runs awesome, just leave it running when you can cuz it takes a bit to start up. or put a new fast HD in it and itll start snappy, its, amazingly, very efficient on older systems, except it takes more RAM)
Click to expand...

that's funny, because at work we had a handfull of old laptops that we had no choice but to put win2000 on them so they could be on the domain, and they actually ran fairly well. that was really surprising after hearing all the suggestions from microsoft for minimum system requirements, not to mention the suggestions from various sys admin message boards.

i even had a friend tell me how he was running XP on a system with 64 MB of RAM and a P2 233. said it ran fine after he disabled system restore. rumors abound say the true minimum hardware requirement for win2000 is a 486DX for the reason that it has an on-die math coprocessor. granted, the ammount of RAM weighs heavily on how it will actually perform.
 
thedude42 said:
that's funny, because at work we had a handfull of old laptops that we had no choice but to put win2000 on them so they could be on the domain, and they actually ran fairly well. that was really surprising after hearing all the suggestions from microsoft for minimum system requirements, not to mention the suggestions from various sys admin message boards.

i even had a friend tell me how he was running XP on a system with 64 MB of RAM and a P2 233. said it ran fine after he disabled system restore. rumors abound say the true minimum hardware requirement for win2000 is a 486DX for the reason that it has an on-die math coprocessor. granted, the ammount of RAM weighs heavily on how it will actually perform.
Click to expand...

I believe Windows 2000 was compiled and optimized for Pentium or better, so I doubt a 486 would be able to run the Windows 2000 kernel, or other binaries that come with it.
 
Josh_B said:
I believe Windows 2000 was compiled and optimized for Pentium or better, so I doubt a 486 would be able to run the Windows 2000 kernel, or other binaries that come with it.
Click to expand...

yes, it was optimized for it, similar to how aplications add support for the SMID's (MMX, SSE, etc)

but using switches during the install, you can do it on a 486DX. using the windows setup program default will return an error that your hardware does not meet the specifications, but you can get around that using a command line or unattended install. you are definitely correct that dropping the cd in and booting will not allow you to install on a 486DX machine.

you can't install windows 2000 on a 486SX at all, however, because of the math coprocessor not being on-die.
 
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