Last Updated on October 21, 2010 by Dave Farquhar
I can’t remember if I linked this before or not, so here’s Windows 2000 on 32 MB of RAM.
Of course I find this interesting. And his advice is pretty good. My first choice for an OS in 32 megs of RAM would be Windows 95, and probably Windows 95a at that (and gee, some idiot wrote a book about that), but if you need better reliability and stability, Windows 2000 is a good second choice.
One piece of advice worth mentioning that he didn’t mention: If there’s a modem on the system, lose it, especially if it’s a Winmodem. That’ll save lots of precious RAM and CPU cycles.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
Reminds me of last year when I upgraded a blogging friend’s old Dell system (salvaged from an employer) where she was running WinXP on 32 meg of ram and only 1 or 2 gigabytes of disk. I upgraded the BIOS to support larger hard drives and installed the 10 gig drive and 128 meg of ram salvaged from an old Pentium III 500 MHz system a few years ago. I imaged everything from the old disk drive using the free Seagate utilities. It took about four hours total, and most of that time was copying the drive. She couldn’t believe how fast that old (really old) Dell system ran with more memory. Plus, the new disk’s IDE controller was significantly better than the old one. I hate throwing out old technology just because I can’t use it anymore. There’s always someone who can benefit from it.