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 started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
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.