Yay or nay?

Never found out what the core basic install of XP Pro uses, in terms of hard drive space.

Yep. You'll need 2.1G or a touch above, so 3G is easily ok to load XP Pro + the service packs and the likes

You will even have a little disc space left

Well, as long as I have 200k for a certain download and a little for all its other bits. Thanks.

Yay or nay?

Never found out what the core basic install of XP Pro uses' date=' in terms of hard drive space. [/quote']

Yes but those old drives are very slow and XP is hardware heavy. You can get a 40Gb one for around

AFAIK the only restriction is that it needs 512mb mem if looking at an old machine (i.e not 256).

Mo

AFAIK the only restriction is that it needs 512mb mem if looking at an old machine (i.e not 256).

Mo

Windows XP will run with 64 megs of RAM. Slowly' date=' but it will run and is supported by MS.[/color']

3.2gb is just enough if you don't install any optional components , set the page file to a minimal size and don't use hibernation (and preferably never turn the PC on).

I might be able to find you something a bit bigger in my spares drawer at work if you are lucky.

Windows XP will run with 64 megs of RAM. Slowly, but it will run and is supported by MS.

Slowly and unstably if you are running any applications. It seems to get it knickers in a knot when using / accessing the swapfile. Freez or crash results all too often. One of my ex IT customers insists on doing this instead of getting memory upgrades or new machines. Must cost him a small fortune in lost man hours. XP is recommended to run on a minimum of 128Mb but will run on less, just very poorly. Half a gig does the job properly for

Realistic minimum for XP Pro is 2.5G drive (no apps installed, basic install, service packs etc). Definitely turn off hibernation - it doesn't work that great anyway for desktops and the drive is too slow to benefit from it.

Memory wise - 64MB works, but based on intended use (FAH from what I can gather ) I'd stick to 512MB, single stick of decent, stable RAM.

If the mobo can do dual channel with two sticks, get two sticks of 256MB.

Unless your CPU is plenty fast I'd avoid going for the 'bigWU' setting, as that requires a fast CPU and more RAM.

With a HDD of this kinda speed, extra RAM will allow XP Pro to cache stuff in memory and get the best benefits.

Turn off the indexing service and screen saver. Instead just get it to power down your monitor. That way it doesnt use 1% CPU for the blank screen screen saver

The indexing service is a CPU hog that has never IMHO done any good - and that trashes your disk a lot.

Antivirus software IMHO is a must, maybe AVG's freebie is a good choice, if you are really concerned about performance you could turn off the 24-hour-scan thing and just use the real time scanner

Although it will run xp on such a small drive I really wouldnt recommend doing it. Its gonna hammer that drive when it comes time to read from your swap file and I expect a drive of that size to be on the very old and very slow side of things. I would expect the machine to run like an overloaded donkey on its way to market. best find a cheap larger drive for this type of use and throw some memory at the thing too. Also make sure you disable any of the services that the machine wont need. i would also recommend turning off the useless indexing service on the drive, hibernation and once the machine is up and running and your not going to touch anything else on it I would turn off system restore and disable the services for it, this will save some more space and free up some resources too.

Don't do it... really don't you machine will have a paddy with a swap file.

Also a hard disk that old won't be reliable and with new large ones at sub £50 it isn't worth it

For the purpose intended (FAH only) it is perfectly fine and does NOT cause any performance problems other than a slow initial load.

If you used this thing for any other tasks it will be dog slow and it will be worth spending 30 quid on a new(er) drive. However in this case it's a cheap FAH-only box which won't swap to disk much, if at all. The running core will get the real RAM, so it should be perfectly fine