Installing Windows XP Pro on 8MHz PC with 20MB RAM

Filed under: Windows

Installing Windows XP Pro on 8MHz PC with 20MB RAM

by Brad Linder Feb 25th 2007

Sure, you can install Linux on pretty much anything with a chip these days, but what about Windows XP? The official minimum requirements for an installation are a 233MHz processor and 64MB or RAM, but for some those are just guidelines.

Over at winhistory.de, a couple of enterprising users with way too much time on their hands decided to push the limits. It turns out that the processor doesn't matter as much as the RAM. If you try installing Windows XP on a system with a 75MHz processor, but 64MB of RAM, it will work, just slowly. If you try anything with less than 64MB of memory, you'll get an error message. But, once XP is installed, you can remove RAM and the system will still boot (unless you remove too much).

After installing XP on Pentium-based systems, the guys continued removing RAM and underclocking their CPUs to find the slowest working configuration. The winner was a system running at 8MHz with 20MB of RAM (it might actually be 18MB, it's a bit hard to tell from the description).

It takes 30 minutes to boot the system. Even though you'll start to see icons pop up on the screen it'll take another 17 minutes before you can click on them. And the CPU is at 100% all the time, but just think how low your energy bills would be if you were running this machine?

[via Slashdot]

Tags: cpu, pentium, win xp, windows xp, WindowsXp, winhistory, winhistory.de, WinXp

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Tony said 9:17PM on 2-25-2007

My computer must be "special" according to this. It's 133 mhz but has absolutely no RAM because the slots fried. When I installed it, XP automatically decided to use the hard drive as VRAM and to this day still works fine. Doesn't work GREAT, but it works for streaming mp3's around the house.

Shibathedog said 9:18PM on 2-25-2007

are you sure? that shouldn't work at all, you have to have some RAM, its just kind of the way a computer works, most mobos wont even let you boot without some RAM present.

pr0ch0r said 10:48AM on 3-01-2007

l0l :)

my 486 has good replacement of RAM modules, little whilte mouse works very fast, especialy if she's hungry.... :]]

rippleyaliens said 1:03PM on 3-15-2007

WOW this rocks. IT proves to me, that the aggressive system recomendations are for the people who have the old anchors at home, yet will buy a $400 operating system, yet not buy a $399 computer from sams club.....

I always wondered if xp would run on a very old machine, i dont have any older beasts lying around or i would try.

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