On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 8:37 PM Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 12:31 PM dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > The person who passed it on said [Transmeta Crusoe] was "Slow, slow, SLOW". > > No surprise - it came with WindowsXP SP2, and took *8* minutes to simply > > *boot*, and a lot more to do anything once up. > > I heard that XP was designed to get to the desktop in 30 secs. Not > necessarily responsive nor able to be used just yet, but at least it > would show up (in optimal conditions). Of course, that was P3/P4 > (single core) era.
I don't recall my installations coming up that quickly, but on decent HW it was responsive enough. I ran it dual-booting with Ubuntu on a 32bit desktop with a dual-core Intel CPU. That was fun. The machine had 4GB RAM, but for technical reasons XP could only see/use about 3.2GB of it. I found a freeware RAMdisk that could see/use the RAM Windows couldn't see, and had a 768MB RAMdisk seen as Z:. First step was putting Firefox cache on it, which was easy and could be done in about:config on Firefox. Next step was putting the Firefox *profile* on the RAMdisk. That took more fiddling. The profile was stored in a Zip archive on the HD, and unzipped to the RAMdisk when XP booted via a Startup script. A custom Firefox profile pointed at the RAMdisk as the location of the profile to use. Shutdown was trickier. I needed to intercept the shutdown command and run another script that would zip the copy on the RAMdisk back to the hard drive to catch changes made in that session. Because I used XP Pro, I could use Group Policy Editor to set up something to do that. The shutdown script created five days worth of backups with the date as part of the name. If I had an Oops! moment ans shot myself in the foot I could restore from a previous version and continue. If the PC crashed and burned, I lost only changes I might have made in that session, and I didn't bother preserving cache. I have fast broadband and simply to rebuild cache from scratch. > Of course, nowadays we have SSDs and other speedups, but it still > varies due to many factors. The limits on the p2110 were IDE4 HD (BIOS limitation, so swapping in a faster drive wouldn't assist) and proof network performance. (Internet access was dead slow, even connected by CAT5 cable to my router.) > > WinXP wants 512MB *minimum* to think about working. > > On the p2110, it did a good job of emulating mainframe "death by thrashing". > > I was using a P4 with only 128 MB for a year or so (about ten years > ago). I used Opera instead of (thrashing) Firefox, which was good > enough for lightweight browsing and email (and NTVDM). That was before > Opera became Chrome (Blink?) based. I looked at an assortment of browsers. Firefox was way too big. Opera was better, as was earlier Chrome, but that's not saying a lot. They invoked faster, but performance once up left a lot to be desired because of poor network performance. The big hobble was really poor disk I/O, so any application of real size was a problem. On the Puppy side, the default browser was SeaMonkey 1.1, but it was increasingly behind the web standards curve, and simply didn't handle a lot of sites. I gave up on it fast. (And the 1.x branch was no longer supported or getting patches. It was being built in his basement by a Mozilla engineer who really wanted to turn off the machine doing it. Puppy really needed static builds of software, and SeaMonkey 2.X couldn't be built static. 32bit Firefox ran okay on the Ubuntu side, but still suffered from poor I/O. Chrome pre-Blink was the better option. But poor network performance meant *no* browser would provide a happy experience. (IE5 sucked wind on the Win2K side.) > > Repartition, reformat, set it up to quad-boot Win2K (which runs in > > 256MB RAM,) Puppy Linux, Ubuntu Linux and FreeDOS. > > Win 2000 was notable for not "phoning home", but overall it wasn't > much slimmer than XP (and only the latter was targeted at home users). I didn't care about phoning home, and it *would* run in 240MB RAM. I just stripped out everything that *could* be stripped out of Startup. A big save was turning off Windows Update. Win2K no longer got patches, and disabling Windows Update save a SVCHOST.EXE process and 10MB RAM. I did have a few applications that needed at least XP to run, but I could live without them. > Although XP 64-bit (NT 5.2) in 2005 was a (relatively) rare release, > too. Both died in 2010 and 2014, respectively. (Obviously, 7 just died > earlier this year. I still barely use it, but ....) I know people still trying to run Win7. I don't recommend it. I'm actually pleased with Win10 Pro, but then, I have the HW to support it. > > Puppy Linux is designed for older, less powerful hardware. (A poster > > on the Puppy forums described creating a dedicated media server based > > on Puppy that ran on an ancient Toshiba laptop with *16MB* RAM. > > Yes, but Puppy was much leaner in the old days (2.x??). It's changed a > lot, and there were/are many (incompatible) derivatives. Still, I like > it for what it does. Puppy took getting used to. The notion of *always* running as root gave this old tine *nix sysadmin hives. (I had been at pains on systems I administered to insure end users *couldn't* get root.) I realized that Puppy was simply doing the same thing DOS and Windows implementations did - assuming the user at the KB was Administrator with all powers to do anything, and could be viewed the same way. But aside from the plethora of versions (and go ahead, figure out which was best for what you wanted to do), Puppy was simply too non-standard. The closest thing to a "standard" Linux implementation was Ubuntu. People on the Puppy forums went on about Puppy being a good way to learn about Linux. Er, no. It's a good way to learn about *Puppy*. It is enough *unlike* other distros that knowing Puppy won't help much in learning them. I spent more time on the Ubuntu side than I did in Puppy. Each one mounted the other's filesystem when I\it booted, so I had funn setting things up so there was *one* instance of large apps, residing on one filesystem or the other, but runable from either OS. > > He had to create the system image on a more powerful machine, write it to > > a hard drive, and swap the HD into the Toshiba to boot and run it, but > > it worked once he did.) > > Older machines didn't boot from USB jump drives. (Try PLoP boot manager.) I don't believe his did. > > Ubuntu isn't, but by installing from the Minimal CD which booted to a > > command line, and picking and choosing what got installed through > > apt-get, it was possible to get a working installation. (Using ext4 > > as the file system on both Linux instances helped.) > > For a simple cmdline *nix install (with most common POSIX tools), > something like FreeBSD or Minix would probably suffice. IIRC, the > requirements were still pretty low for FreeBSD (64 MB RAM, 486 DX). Or > you could try ancient Slackware 11 (ZipSlack from 2006). Whether that would work would depend on what you wanted to do.Minix likely wouldn't work. Whether FreeBSD would would depend on your use cases. We use machines to run software. The OS sits between the hardware and us and the programs we use. The question is "What programs do you want to run?" In my case, the answer was Linux applications, with a GUI. Lxde provided a lightweight GUI. How well programs worked depended on size. I didn't look, but I expect a fair bit of what I wanted to run didn't *exist* for FreeBSD. > > The problem on all of them was less CPU speed and RAM, and more > > constricted I/O due to IDE4 HD and poor network performance. The > > *OSes* ran okay. Large apps did not. > > RAM is usually the biggest bottleneck. I'm (almost) surprised they > still sell machines with "only" 4 GB of RAM, especially now that > everything is always 64-bit. Oh, RAM was a huge bottleneck, but I/O and network performance were worse. I heard to my surprise for a woman in Hong Kong that had XP running acceptably on her p2110. The machine I got had 256MB RAM, with a daughter card available to bring it to 384MB Not enough to make XP happy. There was an earlier Fujitsu model with 128MB RAM, and a 256MD daughter card. I looked, but could not find confirmation that I could put the 256MB daughter card into my p2110 and get a working 512MB RAM system, so I passed. She got one and installed it, and it worked and ran XP acceptably. My hat was off to her, but since this was an exercise in seeing what performance I could wring out of old HW *without* throwing money at it, I didn't regret passing on trying it. I have XP Home dual-booting with Ubuntu on an old Acer Aspire 1 notebook. The Acer has 1,5GB RAM. XP more or less works. 32bit Lubuntu also works. On the occasions I use it, I boot onto Lubuntu. ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
