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256 MB enough?

By wompai ·
Hey, guys

I am going to make a computer out of scrap and donate it to charity, but I've got this 256MB DDR Memory chip, is this enough to run windows XP on? It is only going to be used for social-networking and surfing on the net. Its not going to be used as game-computer. To make a long story short: It's not gonna be used for heavy-duty tasks and programs.

Is 256 MB enough?


Thanks in advance

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by whiterose_umair

it depend on your work. if you want that you run games and other graphical programs it may be difficult to run. it also depend upon your system if your hard disk is less space like 10 GB or 20 GB it also work better than 40 GB hard disk with help of 256 RAM.

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It will work, slowly, but it will work

by robo_dev In reply to 256 MB enough?

As long as the clock speed is at least 2.4GHZ or so, and the hard drive is not some ancient Maxtor 40, it will run XP. Not well, but it will run. If you really tweak it (shut off services and startup programs you don't need) then it may be useable.

The issue is that the hard drive will really thrash with only 256, so if it's an old and slow hard drive, the system will crawl.

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Reponse To Answer

by wompai In reply to It will work, slowly, but ...

It's a 1.5 GHz AMD sempron and has a Maxtor 20GB HDD.

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i've seen xp run with only 64

by PurpleSkys In reply to 256 MB enough?

but it sure wasn't pretty. 256 isn't too bad, but if you could get your hands a little more, it would run smoother.

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Why not install Ubuntu?

by Choppit In reply to 256 MB enough?
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by Ternarybit In reply to Why not install Ubuntu?

Because ubuntu runs best on XFS, and XFS loves the memory even more than it loves being obtuse. Between that and a virtual file system, I wouldn't run ubuntu on anything < 1gb

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Reponse To Answer

by wompai In reply to Why not install Ubuntu?

What about Xubuntu?

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Onboard video

by Nunob In reply to 256 MB enough?

If you have onboard video you may want to either look for an add on video card or at bare minimum go into the BIOS and make sure it is stealing as little as possible say 8MB's. If you have any extra hard drives you could toss one on a separate controller and move the pagefile to it which may help some. You can find lots of tips also for things like disabling the effects in XP that all will add up.

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It will be slow

by doug m. In reply to 256 MB enough?

XP, in my opinion, really should have 512 as a bare minimum. You are planning on running some sort of anti-virus, right? That alone will place a burden on the RAM.

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Linux

by pivotmac In reply to 256 MB enough?
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I'm gonna say, 512 is realistic as well

by JamesRL In reply to 256 MB enough?

My parents had an old PC that I set up for them as a browser/email only box, running Win2K, which is less demanding than XP. They had 512MB and a 2Ghz processor.

And once you load it up with things like, antivirus, antispyware, flash, java etc, its pretty darn slow.

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