Lately I have had a couple of customers wanting to have windows XP on their old computers. One of these computers was a Compaq Presario 1681 laptop, this laptop is a Stone Age monster that most techies won’t even look at, but after a chitchat with the customer I decided to give it a shot. I told him he won’t get a gaming system when he picks it up, but he would have a working PC.
This PC had 64 MB of RAM and a Pentium II processor, or equivalent to a Pentium II, I don’t remember what type of processor it was, but it was very slow one. The first thing I did was to put another 64 MB of RAM in the system to make it 128 MB the most the system can support ïŠ then My first shot was to install Windows NT workstation 4.0. The installation was fine, but I could not find any driver for the video, Ethernet, and other devices in the laptop. Then I installed windows XP home edition, which installed fine, and recognized all the drivers, but the system could barely handled the load. I basically had to wait 10 minutes to open up internet explorer. Not good.
Then I remembered reading somewhere about a release of windows XP for legacy PCs, it was exactly what I needed. Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs is a thin client version of Windows XP designed for old less powerful PCs. It was released in 2006 and it does not support everything supported in a normal windows XP installation, but most of the components people use are there. The only problem I had was that this version of windows XP is not easily accessible, is only for software assurance customers at Microsoft, but ya know I have my contacts, and very soon I had a copy of Windows Fundamentals on my hand.
Windows Fundamentals was very easy to install, and it has many options to install from, one of the options is to only install Remote Desktop, or you can do a custom install and choose the applications you want, I chose to install the standard installation, all the drivers were found and the system ran fairly good even with AVG installed.
The other computer I upgraded to Windows Fundamentals was a little bit more powerful, with 256 MB of memory and a P3. But again the owner got a fast computer with Windows Fundamentals.
Do you have an old computer you would like to use, but don’t want to use Windows 98 or Windows NT anymore? Leave your comments below and probably we can figure out something together to put those old systems in good use again.
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