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Patman

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 13, 2004
Messages
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Slowly building up a garden of one or two computers to start and I acquired an older amd. It's clocked up to 250mhz and I don't know what it is stock. Whenever I try to install windows xp pro I get "general protection fault(or error)" and I tried to escape to linux and the system halts to error one or two and it cannot uncompress the linux. Are these issues linked? I just want to get this thing working asap. It has a 10 gig hard drive. Speaking of which, how much do hard drive's matter in folding? None? Just enough to install os and folding program? Thanks.
 
Well I guess start by setting the cpu clock to default. Installing OS's on an overclocked system might not be the best idea.

233 is the min for XP, I honestly don't know if it would install on less. I actually did install XP on a 233 once, don't ask why. I think the CPU's at that era have special instruction sets the 166 mzh chips did not for example.

Good luck.
 
Actually Windows XP Pro will run on a single or dual socket 8 pentium pro 200 mhz. I had a machine awhile back take the install and was able to load the operating system.

Here is something strange to point out with windows 2000, It will run on a Ibm p75mhz machine. I tried this last year to see if windows 2000 would install on something this slow and old.

I had at least 128mb of simms and a p75mhz processor in the computer. Surprising enough it ran great for the age of machine I had lying around.

Here is some examples of older pc's running an operating system, that wasn't suppose to run on something this old.
 
Overclocked it way down FSB down all the way for memory issues and same thing is still happening.
 
Scorpionjwp said:
Actually Windows XP Pro will run on a single or dual socket 8 pentium pro 200 mhz. I had a machine awhile back take the install and was able to load the operating system.

Here is something strange to point out with windows 2000, It will run on a Ibm p75mhz machine. I tried this last year to see if windows 2000 would install on something this slow and old.

I had at least 128mb of simms and a p75mhz processor in the computer. Surprising enough it ran great for the age of machine I had lying around.

Here is some examples of older pc's running an operating system, that wasn't suppose to run on something this old.
Click to expand...
Haha, i had the same setup untill recently. I think some of the RAM was bad in it, but as i don't have a monitor with me in college, i can't really tell.

Patman: will it boot in DOS? also, try the knoppix live CD that's linked in the FAQ, that will get you up and folding right away.
HDDs matter, but almost like you said, pretty much only to the extent of installing the OS and FAH. It's accessed every time FAH finishes a frame though, because FAH rewrites some of the files after every frame. So if your client has to wait for your HDD to spin up every time it finishes a frame, then you'll lose ~5 seconds of CPU time that happens. (I think, i'm just guessing here). So it might be a decent idea to make sure that your HDD timeout is > the interval between frames.

But, on the other hand, it might be worth the loss in CPU time if you can save a few kW in electricity over the life of the computer. Hope that helps.
 
I haven't tried a boot into dos but I keep getting I/O errors when i tried floppy boot for xp. If that helps. My understanding is the hard drive actually slows the machine down when folding?

Edit: It will boot into DOS
 
The HDD only slows the machine (i'm still unsure about this, mind you) if it 'sleeps' and my guess is that when the FAH process tries to write to the disk, it has to wait to continue processing data for a few seconds because the HDD has to begin spinning again in order for the data to be written. If you've got the HDD set so that it will never stop spinning, then there will be no loss in performance. 'Course i could be all wrong, and the data could just go straight to the HDD's cache, or the FAH process may not need wait for the 'write OK' to keep folding.

Well, that's good news that it will boot in DOS, though. If i remember correctly, i had some problem installing XP on a machine almost that slow, so it may just not work with XP. Do you have a copy of Win2k install?
I'd still recommend downloading the knoppix image, burning that, and seeing if you can boot from (and fold from) that. Good luck!
 
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