Going from XP back to ME?

M

Meng-Chieh

Weaksauce
Joined
Apr 15, 2004
Messages
65
IntelÆ PentiumÆ II processor
450 MHz
100MHz front side bus
10.2GB high-performance hard drive
128MB SDRAM
(expandable to 384MB)
32K primary cache
512K second-level cache

Above is the spec of my aging HP Pavilion 8390 system. I've installed XP on it myself but it's been acting sluggishly, so I want to go back to a previous OS. Having no access to Win 98 SE, I'm considering going back to Win ME instead. Do you guys think this machine will perform faster with ME instead?
 
paulmr said:
get a copy window 2000 it runs great on 400mhz machines
Click to expand...


That will be a problem for me though - can't afford new os right now. So you ppl think the machine will actually perform slower with ME than with XP?
 
speed wise ME is going to be better for you I don't think WINXP works very well on ~400 mhz machines. ME is just so buggy thats all. So for you situation I think ME is your only solution at a free way to speed the computer up... some more ram would help see if you have anything you could trade for some RAM in the FS/FT forum theres usualy somebody in there with some pc100/133 for trade
 
I can host it for you bit torrent style, or I can MSN file transfer it to you. I got it free during the give away, its one CD. PM me if you like. I have an 80K/s upload speed, and if you are on DSL I don't mind helping you.

Cheers,
 
i use xp on a 300 mhz laptop no problem. get 128mb more sdram and youre set.
 
Meng-Chieh said:
128MB SDRAM
(expandable to 384MB)


Above is the spec of my aging HP Pavilion 8390 system. I've installed XP on it myself but it's been acting sluggishly, so I want to go back to a previous OS. Having no access to Win 98 SE, I'm considering going back to Win ME instead. Do you guys think this machine will perform faster with ME instead?
Click to expand...


Increase the RAM and you will notice a big improvement. Also go visit Black Viper and lean your XP install up some to improve performance.
 
Tweak the shit out of XP. Theres lots of guides on the internet. Oh another 64-128 megs of ram wouldnt hurt either. You can probably pick up some used sdr at local places.
 
A friend of mine has a very similar system, except 256mb of ram and it runs xp fine. Just get some more ram and it will run xp fine.
 
I have ran XP on a Pentium 233 system, and with 256 megs of RAM it was usable. I would use _Anything_ over Windows ME if I had the choice.

With windowsXP, did you tweak the UI at all? There is quite a few bits of eye candy and services you can turn off to make the system far more responsive on slow systems.
 
Disabling services give you absolutely no performance increase, and you will actually get less usability out of your OS by doing so. All you will see is a slightly decreased boot and shutdowntime by shutting off services.

As for what OS, if you can stick another 128 MB in there you will find it runs XP just fine. You don't even have to turn off the "eye candy" if you don't want, since you won't see much difference anyway. What you can do, however, is change the default windowing options, like disabling caching of thumbnails and looking for network printers and folders. Another thing you can do is go into the Performance Options tab (System Properties window >> Advanced >> Performance) and bump down a lot of the animations, if you so choose to, or just select "Adjust for best performance."

On my little web-laptop running XP, I even have themes and styleXP installed and it works wonderfully. However, that machine is pretty much a one-trick pony (well, three-trick—it does word processing and does e-mail too), and if you want better performance squeaked out of it, you can do those things I mentioned to pretty much make the thing work with the bare minimum of video effects.

And while I don't agree with the "Me sucks because it's Me" arguments that don't provide any backing for the argument, I will say that XP is a much better choice than any 9x version of Windows, because the earlier versions worked horribly with hardware and OS-level settings changes, while XP is far more robust and hardware-friendly. Not only that, but you stand a better chance of squeaking a bit more space out of the HDD using NTFS than you would using FAT32, not counting the increased data integrity.
 
GreNME said:
Disabling services give you absolutely no performance increase, and you will actually get less usability out of your OS by doing so. All you will see is a slightly decreased boot and shutdowntime by shutting off services.

As for what OS, if you can stick another 128 MB in there you will find it runs XP just fine. You don't even have to turn off the "eye candy" if you don't want, since you won't see much difference anyway. What you can do, however, is change the default windowing options, like disabling caching of thumbnails and looking for network printers and folders. Another thing you can do is go into the Performance Options tab (System Properties window >> Advanced >> Performance) and bump down a lot of the animations, if you so choose to, or just select "Adjust for best performance."

On my little web-laptop running XP, I even have themes and styleXP installed and it works wonderfully. However, that machine is pretty much a one-trick pony (well, three-trick—it does word processing and does e-mail too), and if you want better performance squeaked out of it, you can do those things I mentioned to pretty much make the thing work with the bare minimum of video effects.

And while I don't agree with the "Me sucks because it's Me" arguments that don't provide any backing for the argument, I will say that XP is a much better choice than any 9x version of Windows, because the earlier versions worked horribly with hardware and OS-level settings changes, while XP is far more robust and hardware-friendly. Not only that, but you stand a better chance of squeaking a bit more space out of the HDD using NTFS than you would using FAT32, not counting the increased data integrity.
Click to expand...

yeah i've already tried tweaking the services and other xp features, and all it did was decrease the boot time from 10 min down to 5, but the overall speed is still SLOWWWWW as hell...
 
Me is the worst OS ever devised by man kind. You should go 98SE or increase your system memory.

PS: I am not sure what your issue is but 5 min boot times is more than a memroy limitation even with an ancient machine. Spyware anyone?
 
jacuzz1 said:
Me is the worst OS ever devised by man kind. You should go 98SE or increase your system memory.

PS: I am not sure what your issue is but 5 min boot times is more than a memroy limitation even with an ancient machine. Spyware anyone?
Click to expand...

I ran spybot- S&D, adaware on the system, and got rid of the spywares, but it still takes 5 min to boot up, i've also used tuneup utilities to get rid of unneeded files, and i've ran bootvis.exe from ms to speed up the system (I've also disabled useless processes). Not sure why it's so slow.

However, I have a BIGGER problem now. I went ahead and reformatted the hard drive to FAT32 so i can install ME. But since i had XP on there I couldn't creat a boot disk for ME. So, I went ahead with the reformat and simply downloaded a ME bootdisk from the net from my new computer. However, with the WIn ME CD in the primary CD-rom drive and the boot disk in the floppy, I get an error messagfe called "non-system disk or error on disk". What happened?
 
I concurr about there probably being spyware on it, or something there that is trying to load at boot time that may or may not have to. What programs are installed on it and expected to run?

yeah i've already tried tweaking the services and other xp features, and all it did was decrease the boot time from 10 min down to 5, but the overall speed is still SLOWWWWW as hell...
Click to expand...
Have you tried all of those things I mentioned you should try? Go into the performance pane and turn off all the fancy "footwork" XP does. I don't recommend disabling services, unless you are intentionally planning to limit the functionality of the machine.

Check what you have loading during bootup, because on my machine that has half the CPU speed yours does with only a little more RAM (144 MB) still boots up in a minute to a minute and a half, and actually performs better than when I had 2000 on it. And this is without making any changes to the performance pane or disabling any services.

[edit] Whoops, looks like it's a moot point now, since you formatted. :eek:
 
Sound like your boot sequence is all messed up. boot to cmos and set floppy as your firt boot device. If its an old rig make sure boot floppy seek is enabled as well

And download this boot disc its one of the best. Use fdisk to delete all non dos partitions and dont forget to get rid of the old master boot record

http://www.perigee.net/~shag/

Ps shag is a friend of mine and even though its say 98 boot its more than that
after your done, set the boot device as cd rom and boot off your me cd if you insist on ME

Here is the guys main page he is a smart guy http://wolfontheloose.com/

good luck
 
In the name of all that is Holy...trade your comp in for a pencil and note tablet before turning back to the darkside of ME. I have XP running on my CS server..its a real killer box...lets see...AMD k62 500 (chomper) with a whopping 128mb of memory. ONBOARD Compaq sound/vid. 3com Lan card. 6 Gb BIGFOOT hd..(complete and utter crap). And this thing takes like maybe 45 seconds to boot up. It surfs the net just fine on my LAN. SO I dont think its your comp that is the problem.

My guess is you have an infection, a load of crap from GAIN or some such coalition of crooks, or have it setup just plain old weird. First off get Avast antivirus (its free..for life..and kicks butt)..and ditch the nortons or Mcafee your running. Avast is better (proven so in testing) its free, and runs in the background on almost no memory. Next...get cacheman (i keep it on a burnt CD for most OS's) I think the web addy is outertech.com if that aint it google it. Will clean up your memory handling chores form the OS. Worth the 3 minute download. Next make sure DMA is enabled. XP sometimes doesnt enable it, and some times a installed app can switch it off. Will be under device managers. Take a proactive approach with your swap partition. Make it a fixed space..double what your memory is. Next go to the run part of XP's start button. Type in MSCONFIG. GO through your startup sequence and disable all the junk you dont need. Kill off the IM's, the Webshots type of garbage. If you want to run Xp on lowend equipment..you need a lean configuration. Sacrifices must be made. I only let my basic windows serrvices, Avast, and cacheman run at startup. And I have decent horsepower in my rig. If your real desperate..go into your display settings...roll it back to "Classic" view..and wipe out the desktop icons. Lastly I would defrag that HDD. It wont make a huge diff..but It wont hurt either. If none of those help at all...well you may have a HD on its last leg. I had a maxtor that one day suddenly decided it would take a month to boot..I figured it was the comp. Lo and behold my HD fried about a month later. Put in a new Seagate..and was back to its old self.

Remember a couple of things if you feel you must go back to ME. After 128mb of mem..your wasting money. It cant use it. SO save your money. Get used to the BSOD. That OS is complete and utter crap. Buggy, unstable, and would give me a reason to spark up my old iMac if those were my choices. I'd trade any amount of speed for stability. Your Mileage may vary. PM me if you need more help.I know alot more tweeks, adn could fill about ten pages of stuff if need be. XP is a very good OS..with a little work..it can run on anything. We can always do some reg hacks...driver tweeking etc.

Codesamurai
 
Codesamurai said:
In the name of all that is Holy...trade your comp in for a pencil and note tablet before turning back to the darkside of ME. I have XP running on my CS server..its a real killer box...lets see...AMD k62 500 (chomper) with a whopping 128mb of memory. ONBOARD Compaq sound/vid. 3com Lan card. 6 Gb BIGFOOT hd..(complete and utter crap). And this thing takes like maybe 45 seconds to boot up. It surfs the net just fine on my LAN. SO I dont think its your comp that is the problem.

My guess is you have an infection, a load of crap from GAIN or some such coalition of crooks, or have it setup just plain old weird. First off get Avast antivirus (its free..for life..and kicks butt)..and ditch the nortons or Mcafee your running. Avast is better (proven so in testing) its free, and runs in the background on almost no memory. Next...get cacheman (i keep it on a burnt CD for most OS's) I think the web addy is outertech.com if that aint it google it. Will clean up your memory handling chores form the OS. Worth the 3 minute download. Next make sure DMA is enabled. XP sometimes doesnt enable it, and some times a installed app can switch it off. Will be under device managers. Take a proactive approach with your swap partition. Make it a fixed space..double what your memory is. Next go to the run part of XP's start button. Type in MSCONFIG. GO through your startup sequence and disable all the junk you dont need. Kill off the IM's, the Webshots type of garbage. If you want to run Xp on lowend equipment..you need a lean configuration. Sacrifices must be made. I only let my basic windows serrvices, Avast, and cacheman run at startup. And I have decent horsepower in my rig. If your real desperate..go into your display settings...roll it back to "Classic" view..and wipe out the desktop icons. Lastly I would defrag that HDD. It wont make a huge diff..but It wont hurt either. If none of those help at all...well you may have a HD on its last leg. I had a maxtor that one day suddenly decided it would take a month to boot..I figured it was the comp. Lo and behold my HD fried about a month later. Put in a new Seagate..and was back to its old self.

Remember a couple of things if you feel you must go back to ME. After 128mb of mem..your wasting money. It cant use it. SO save your money. Get used to the BSOD. That OS is complete and utter crap. Buggy, unstable, and would give me a reason to spark up my old iMac if those were my choices. I'd trade any amount of speed for stability. Your Mileage may vary. PM me if you need more help.I know alot more tweeks, adn could fill about ten pages of stuff if need be. XP is a very good OS..with a little work..it can run on anything. We can always do some reg hacks...driver tweeking etc.

Codesamurai
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply - I had these programs running on the old hp:

Avast Antivirus
Tuneup Utilities 2004
Spybot S&D
Ad-Aware
Bootvis

I've also disabled all the unnecessary services + got rid of eye candies
Defragged HD (it's a new W.D., btw)

With all these, it still took the HP 5 min to fully boot (HD to settle down)

However, I am VERY interested to see your XP tweak guides, so if you could PM me or email me, it'd be great - gonna apply them to my new comp. THanks a bunch!
 
my webserver (http://zmj.no-ip.org) runs windows xp and it has the following specs

P2 233mhz
128mb pc100 ram
40gb 7200 rpm hard drive
some sketchy 8mb agp video card


and it runs

Apache, Cerbus FTP, winamp, and shoutcast stream

and it is still quite useable

turn off all of the visual styles and transitions and all that stuff, that will help out. also adjust your virtual memory.

if all else fails give linux a shot, if you are unsure about linux do a google search for KNOPPIX, this will allow you to boot the computer up using just a cd, so you dont have to format or anything like that, just pop the cd in and enjoy!

hope this helped somewhat
 
Well i've had it - gonna delete ME and go back to XP...sigh...ME just plain sucks...gonna tweak it again but not sure if it'll help at all with the boot speed (which takes like freakin 5 min)...
 
Some suggestions:
  • Don't disable any services (except messenger if you want). Black Viper is a quack and it weakens the OS. Bad idea.
  • Don't install that Tuneup Utilities or whatever it is. If you want a comprehensive list of tweaks, just ask (and ignore the "disable services" tripe).
  • If you can afford to, spring for at least another 128MB of memory. You will see a huge increase in performance.
  • If you ask for tweaking tips, tell us what programs you are going to mainly run on the machine as well, because this will matter a great deal to performance (and why disabling services is a bad idea... many programs use services that QuackViper suggests stopping). Also include any shared devices that it may use.
  • No downing Avast (looks like a pretty decent product... haven't tested it), but you may want to try out another A/V option. Avast may be eating up resources trying to work. AVG may be an option, though it may be just as hungry as Avast with resources (though it seems to use less than McAfee). No definite, but it may be worth a try.
  • Don't expect this machine to perform like machines three or four (or five) times its clock speed, no matter what OS you put on it. Be prepared for it to be slow.

If you have any questions, just ask. Plenty of people here have plenty of advice.
 
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