Windows How much power does XP need?

I'd post this in software, but it doesnt look like many poeple go there, and its pretty general anyways. (move to hardware if you wish, as its a hardware/software thing)

I have windows XP professional (service pack 1). How much ram and CPU power is 'recommended' for this OS?

I currently have an AMD athlon 1.2ghz w/ 416mb SDRAM. But my PC keeps freezing on what seems to be processor intensive tasks (UT2003 is a regular freezer, but only on the main menu for some reason. sometimes mid-game but thats usually with 30+ players which I would expect problemes with).

I *was* going to get an Intel pentium 4 2.53 GHZ w/ 1024mb ram (not decided on motherboard, soyo dragon maybe). But my wonderful aunt who was letting me use her card to buy stuff of the inty-net has canceled her card, and now refuses to let me use her other card.

So basically, my question is: do I have enough p0wer for XP, and if not, why does she freeze on me so. If I do need power, is it important enough to push me' parents to using their card(s) (see my parents gotta pay for everyfin' so their overdrawn now, but me auntie only gots herself to look afters, thats why she let me use her card initially)

 

i believe microsoft recommends a minimum pentium II with 128MB (I can pretty much confirm this as what I use to let my mom check email at home is a PII 450 with 128MB of PC100 and it runs XP Pro without issues)

also going for a ride to S&OS

 

Well on my 1400 MHz 512 DDR rig here, when I install XP, it goes mad crazy laggy, until I can get in and change all the eye-sores off and make it look like 2000.

Also UT2003 isn't really a good way of checking stability or anything, the Unreal engine (so far all incarnations as far as I've been able to look through) all suffer from instability, 2003 and Unreal 2 are much better, but do suffer a similar flaw, one which is adressed in the patch (well 2003 anywayz) and makes it much more stable. But the originals (especially UT) were horrible for crashing.

 

xp runs ok on my amd k6-2 500 with 64meg of RAM

 

TBH I wouldn't be playing UT2K3 on anything less than a 1ghz comp anyway, especially with WinXP on it contending for all the resources, You should probably go for 2K Pro for a less powerful machine or stop playing UT2K3

 

most of our workstations at work are 533-650's with 128mb...

-scoob8000

 

230 volts if you are in the UK

(yes that was lame wasn't it)

 

I have a PII 400 with 256MB and it works fine, can't run any games really, but XP is fine.


it could be your video card

 

I second that. XP Pro runs fine on my PII 333 288MB RAM laptop. Actually it seems to run quicker than 98 did.

abombss

 

ahah I just remembered, a few weeks ago I got Xp on a mates machine fine, it was

Celeron 450mhz
250ish (a dodgy number not a nrmal amount) of ram
20gb hd
A 2 or 4mb onboard gfx

seemed fine although the installation took a lot longer than on more powerful machines, havn't had any complaints yet...

 

AMD Athlon 1.0GHz 1Gig Kensington DDR on an ASUS A7V266
---> XP Pro Runs like a dream

 

Maybe not so lame. While we're talking that kind of "power", how powerful is your power supply? Increased resource strain can tax your PSU, and that could be causing the crashes.

 

You could try updating drivers and possibly check for spy ware using up some of your clock cycles. Your hardware seems to be plenty fast for what your trying to do unless you have apps running in the background such as icq or kaaza when you try playing unreal. I was having minor probs with unreal (not with the app hanging) but it would start as a window for a long time and I increased its priority on my system and that worked just great. One more thing perhaps your graphics card is not upto the game unreal is a very intensive game and it seems to have a few bugs.

 

This is specific to HP Pavilion PCs, but Windows XP requirements are given on this link in great detail.

http://www.hp.com/cposupport/personal_computing/support_doc/bph06720.html

Why your computer is running slow? Well perhaps there are too many items in startup, that run throughout the time you are on the computer. You can disable them by following these steps.

Go to start/run. Type in msconfig. Click on the tab that says startup. Uncheck everything from there except these 6 files if they are there (this is for Windows XP only)
PS2
KBD
igfxtray
hpsysdrv (this is only for hp. look for a similar file in other computers)
hkcmd
rundll32

Also, if u have AOL, don't delete the AOL items also, or AOL will stop working. There are 3 I think, AIM, messenger, etc. See if u can figure out which one it is.
Uncheck everything else.

This should help.