Celeron 1.2GHZ & WinXP SP-2.

[retroborg]

Hello.
I’m thinking about installing WinXP SP-2, Office 2003, with all the latest updates on my mates PC.
It’s the following system:

Celeron 1.2GHZ
256MB RAM
GF2 MX 64MB
20GB HD
Internal 56K Modem

Will it be able to cope with WinXp & Office 2003 adequately?
How well will it work, or should I install Win2000 & Office 2000 instead?

The system will be primarily used for word processing, Web surfing, watching DVDs, playing some minor 3D games, 2D games & emulation.

Thanks in advance.

[redwudz]

It should handle those programs alright. You might think about upping the RAM to 512MB, but even without that, I don't see any problems.

[unclebud]

It will be fairly slow but should work fine, Not much hard drive on your machine though. More ram would help alot.
I have XP and Office running on an HP Celeron 1.3 with only 128mb of ram. It's a company machine so who cares.

[retroborg]

Oh I forgot to mention that I'm also planning on installing Zone Alarm Pro, Microsoft Anti-spam, Ad-Aware/Ad-Watch & McAffee Antivirus Enterprize 7.1, which will all load up on boot-up & take up resources.

So will this PC be able to handle all these & have some resources left to do the rest in WinXP SP-2?
(Word processing, Web surfing, watching DVDs, playing some minor 3D games, 2D games & emulation.)

Thanks in advance.

[redwudz]

Should still handle all that. Your limitations are first the small memory and second the small hard drive. The hard drive should be OK, just don't fill it over 80% capacity. Upping the memory to 512Mb would definitely help with XP and the extra programs.

[ofbarea]

Hi Today I'm using my old Dell optiplex GX1. It's an Slot one machine upgrated to Celeron 1.4.

This machine has 256 MB RAM, a 10 GB hard disk, an USB2/firewire card, a hardware MPEG2 video capture card, an 8 MB ATI 3D Rage Pro (build in), 40 GB external HD, external DVD burner and an USB2 linksys 54G wireless card.

It has WXP home SP2, Office 2000, TMPGEnc DVD author, WinDVD 4, MS antispyware, McAfee Virus Scan 7.1.

It cannot run google earth because of the video card, and I do not use it with virtualdub because of it's speed. I use TMPGEnc for multiplexing/demultiplexing and cut/merge functions.

You will do OK with Windows XP SP2, but I will recommend using Office 2000 because it needs less resources.

For web bowsing I use Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7 because it is faster that Internet explorer and for the few incompatible pages I just use internet explorer.

For the best performance you should tweak a couple of parameters. First go to the control panel and then open system properties. Then click on the Advanced tab. Now click on performance. This will open the Performance options applet. In here select the Visual effects tab. Now check Adjust for best performance. Now go to the advanced tab. In here click on the Virtual memory Change button. This will open the Virtual Memory applet. Click on Custom size and put 512 in the Initial size field. In the maximum size field put 768. Changing the virtual memory will not improve performance, but will ensure that you have a swap file that is not fragmented and will not decrease performance over time.

[retroborg]

But, Wont setting the swap file from 512 to 768 limit the virtual memory all together?

I remember some time ago when I was you using that exact swap file setting, the OS returned a message that it was running low on virtual Memory, so I had to set it to "System Managed" & it never had a problem again.

[ofbarea]

It will limit the virtual memory in your system, but if you reached that message it means that you really need additional phisical memory, or that you are using a really bad application with a nasty memory leak problem. Increase the virtual memory to 4 times the physical memory will give very bad performance due swapping process to an old (therefore slower) disk.

[retroborg]

Yeah, but if I set the Virtual Memory to 512 - 768, that's all ready 3 times the physical Ram (256 in this case) there for I'll probably have bad performance. That’s pretty close to the 4 times the size of physical Ram that you mentioned.

So if I leave it to "System managed" won’t it be better?

[ofbarea]

Windows virtual memory will be used as needed. If you set the minimum Memory utilization to 512, it will reserve a continuous chunk of disk space even if you do not use it completely.

If after setting this parameter you get low virtual memory it will mean that you have too many open applications, and you should star closing windows, or reboot to get rid of the application that has the memory leak. It could also mean that you have a big application that does not really fit in your memory.

If you let windows to handle your memory and you open too many applications, or just one big application, you will end with a very fragmented swap file. This will eventually kill performance, unless you have a good defragmenter that can accommodate this file for you. Neither the build in Windows defragmenter or Norton defragmenter is able to do this in a simple way.

On the other hand in you upgrade the memory of your machine to 512, you do not really need to change Window swap parameters and in this situations leaving it to "System managed" will be better.

[hhhhbk]

PC will be fine for the basic tasks you want

iv run windows xp on a pentium 3 450 with 64mb of ram
fine for web browsing MS word etc

pentium 3s with 128mb of ram are fairly nippy after a fresh install

so a GHz+ celeron with 256mb ram should be more than adequate

[retroborg]

Well, I did install WinXP PRO SP-2, Office 2003, all updates, Mcafee Antivirus Enterprise 7.1 & Ad-Aware Pro, on another PIII 1GHZ, 256MB RAM & TNT2 Model 64 32MB PC & it’s working perfectly. It boots up very fast & all applications work like a charm.

But I’m quite skeptical about my mates PC, because the Celeron 1.2GHZ CPU, is not quite as powerful since it only has 128K Cache, as opposed to the PIII’s 256K Cache.
So I don’t know how it’ll work.

I think the equivalent in “raw” processing power to the Celeron @ 1.2GHZ, is a PIII @ 850MHZ…