Installing Windows XP Pro on 8MHz PC with 20MB RAM
Over at winhistory.de, a couple of enterprising users with way too much time on their hands decided to push the limits. It turns out that the processor doesn't matter as much as the RAM. If you try installing Windows XP on a system with a 75MHz processor, but 64MB of RAM, it will work, just slowly. If you try anything with less than 64MB of memory, you'll get an error message. But, once XP is installed, you can remove RAM and the system will still boot (unless you remove too much).
After installing XP on Pentium-based systems, the guys continued removing RAM and underclocking their CPUs to find the slowest working configuration. The winner was a system running at 8MHz with 20MB of RAM (it might actually be 18MB, it's a bit hard to tell from the description).
It takes 30 minutes to boot the system. Even though you'll start to see icons pop up on the screen it'll take another 17 minutes before you can click on them. And the CPU is at 100% all the time, but just think how low your energy bills would be if you were running this machine?
[via Slashdot]
