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Coding Horror
programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood

January 19, 2006

The World's Slowest Windows XP System

I'm not sure exactly why, but the guys at winhistory.de managed to install Windows XP on a 20 megahertz Pentium 1 system with 32 megabytes of RAM:

The system info dialog for the world's slowest XP install

That puts the XP in back in Windows XP -- Xtremely Pokey:

The CPU is working at 60% of full capacity at the Desktop! Nowadays with a modern CPU you have to run many tasks in background to reach such a high level of work.

For this reason you had to have patience, very often. Do recognize the changing of the blue color on the screen before the "Welcome"-page?? At 20 MHz you can see all 8 blues line by line!

Great stuff. The actual minimum system requirements for Windows XP are a 233 MHz CPU and 64 megabytes of RAM. But even a 20 MHz Pentium is still orders of magnitude more powerful than this Osborne Executive:

Osborne laptop ad

Most people associate Osborne Computers with the Osborne Effect-- pre-announcing the next model too early and decimating the sales of your current models. But as it turns out, that's an urban legend.

Posted by Jeff Atwood    View blog reactions
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Comments

theres no such thing as a 20mhz pentium chip. this is clearly photoshoped.

before the pentium was the 486 33mhz so i doubt a later model chip would run slower than the earlier model. i think there was a pentium 75mhz and im sure there was a p90, because thats what most people had at the time.

definately no p20 because its impossible.

um on January 19, 2006 7:55 PM

maybe it's a Pentium 120? perhaps windows has problems recognizing double digit speeds. Like that roadside radar dealie I passed last week at 120.. it just read 20.. ;)

Dave Ko on January 19, 2006 10:28 PM

I _think_ the slowest Pentium was a 60mhz.

I once installed Windows 95 on a 486DX2/66 as a lark. You could literally see the window chrome being drawn, the background being filled, etc. It was pretty funny.

foobar on January 19, 2006 10:28 PM

Perhaps XP's catalogue of processor names doesn't go as far back as 386SX? Hence, in this demonstration, XP was not actually running on a Pentium machine, but a 386SX/20?

Matt on January 19, 2006 10:31 PM

If you guys read the link, what they did is use the motherboard jumpers to severely underclock the board. The other trick they did was to install it on a system that met the minimum requirements (64MB RAM), and then take that install and move it to a crappier machine.

Alex on January 19, 2006 10:47 PM

Dang, I could have sworn I posted a response to this.

The multipliers on old Pentiums (up to the P2-333) are unlocked. That means you can set the system speed to any valid multiple of the bus speed. The minimum Pentium bus speed is 60mhz.

The board they used has some oddball bus speed jumpers that let them get down to 25 mhz and 20mhz. Those are 486-era bus speeds!

It's all in the article, although their translation to English is a little.. rough.

> I once installed Windows 95 on a 486DX2/66 as a lark

Win95 should be fine on that system with enough memory.. lots of 486es around in 1995 still!

Jeff Atwood on January 20, 2006 12:00 AM

At an old job, I had to install Win 95 on the minimum for some compat testing. 386 CPU with 4MB RAM. Sure, technically you can "run" the OS in that setup, but it starts swapping if you just right-click something. It took literally 5 seconds to get a context menu.
If there is a hell, that's what the computer there are like.

Jacques Troux on January 20, 2006 2:46 AM

I like the picture of the Osborne Executive. It reminds me of a "portable" IBM computer that I used to have to lug back and forth when I was the yearbook editior in highschool. This was an 8086 processor with a 7" amber display. The keyboard folded up into the case which was at least 24" x 18" x 10". The thing must have weighed at least 30 pounds since the monitor was built in. It was probably one of IBM's first portables. Yikes!

matt on January 20, 2006 9:27 AM

I ran Win95 on a 486-66 with no problems. The trick is to make sure that you had enough memory. Win 95 really needs at least 16 MB of RAM which was a lot back then.

Mike Swaim on January 20, 2006 9:33 AM

I ran Win95 on a 486-DX2-66 with 4MB of RAM. I later upgraded to 8MB and it was quite snappy.

matt on January 20, 2006 10:37 AM

Yeah, it only had 2 megs of memory. Pretty low. Lots of disk swapping.

foobar on January 20, 2006 6:15 PM

> theres no such thing as a 20mhz pentium chip. this is clearly photoshoped.
>
> before the pentium was the 486 33mhz so i doubt a later model chip would run
> slower than the earlier model. i think there was a pentium 75mhz and im sure
> there was a p90, because thats what most people had at the time.
>
> definately no p20 because its impossible.

You could at least try to pretend that you'd read TFA, he's running a Pentium I/60 underclocked at 20MHz.

Masklinn on January 23, 2006 4:41 AM

> Yeah, it only had 2 megs of memory. Pretty low. Lots of disk swapping.

Well, that's weird, because 4mb was the minimum memory spec for Win95. They had to cut a LOT of corners to fit it into 4mb.

Jeff Atwood on January 23, 2006 4:49 AM

I have installed windows xp sp1 on a pentium 1 133Mhz and 80mb ram. It runs a little bit slow but does the job. I also installed ms office 2003 and it still runs. I have 2 HDD a 4GB and a 30GB. Too cool.

Andy on March 3, 2006 10:22 AM

I am using a 486 Laptop with 4MB of RAM and 25 Mhz of Processor. It has Windows 95 installed on it. It runs quite slow but i browsed the internet with it (A 56K Modem that worked on COM Port). I couldun't install a decent browser like IE 5 but Mosaic worked. I could also view my e-mail with Microsoft Mail. I make my job with it.

Tudor on September 2, 2006 2:13 PM

it could be instaled at the minimum specs then had the processor underclocked and 32mb of ram removed

mon on September 4, 2006 8:33 AM

Well, it is funny i came across this crazy page because the minimum for windows xp is 233 proccesor with 64 megs ram. i am as we speak installing it on a 200 that i overclocked to 210 and it is actually working fine, not real fast but stable. i will go in and shut down all the crap services and the unessecary display features though

John on October 27, 2006 6:10 PM

I time a go i ran Win95 on a 386-sx 25mhz with 8MB of RAM and a 4g hard drive with a 8 bit isa graphic card. I later upgraded to 16MB, it delayed 9 hours to install windows 95 and 3 hours to install the IE4, it was running the 16 colors, when the windows as on it run prety good with the basic windows aplications

Jonhy Portugal on November 9, 2006 7:04 AM

Ok Thats Not Really A Reall Windows Xp
Its Called TinyXP Its A Windows That Makes Your Computer Look And Work Like Windows Xp And Plus You Can Install It On Any Old Computer I Got A Pentium 1 150MHz With 1.2GB Hard Drive And 128MB Of Memory And Its Working Really Fast So Search For TinyXp To Download It Its Really Small Windows Xp And I Would Only Install It On Any Old Computers Like A Computer That Is Under 400MHz Becasue TinyXp does not have any drivers it only got really old drivers for old computer So search TinyXP And Download It

Your Computer Needs To Be
Between 20MHz To 400MHz
32MB Of Memory
600MB Hard Drive
CD Rom

Thats All You Need To Run TinyXp And To Make It Fast

SEARCH TinyXP Now To Download It

Go To http://torrentpond.com And Search TinyXP

Adam on June 14, 2007 8:14 PM

Great unbeliaveable, but truly the minimum speed for x is 100 or 133 mhz.
I tried at 133mhz CPU CELERON SOCKET 1. with 64mb ram the simm type 1mb vga. hdd 1gb. with su 90 watts.

PC FREAK on November 29, 2007 10:08 AM

just so u all know, the pentium was the 486. they could not market the name "486" and it could have been the first pentium overclocked to 20 Mhz.

nick on January 26, 2008 12:57 PM

i once installed windows 3.0 on a 60 hz equitrac terminal computer with 1024k ram it takes only a little while to load and has a GUI. this is probably the simplest setup possible and is still compatiable with modern windows xp programs. i loaded notepad, wordpad, solitaire and othello (nicknamed resetti). By swapping the 2.5in 64mb flash drive with my laptop's hard disk with an adapter i was able to write the programs to the disk other programs from a floppy disk. the system even has microsoft antivirus and looks somewhat similar to the os they were running on the macintosh se. i'm also trying to run windows xp on a pentium one 199mhz with 2.16gb hard disk but keep running into error "vga64k" probably too little ram.

brandy on February 1, 2008 10:02 PM

When Windows 95 was introduced, the minimum specs were a 386DX with 4 megs of RAM, VGA card and about 50 megs of hard drive space. (It would still install on a 386SX.) This was to bring in as many Win 3.1 users as possible and while 95 ran (but very slowly) it started people on the never-ending upgrade march.

I'm running Windows 95 on a 386-40 w/32 megs of RAM, 387 co-pro, SCSI hard drive and CD-ROM, Soundblaster soundcard and Intel LAN card (which connects through a router to my cable modem).

If you're going to try Win95 on a 386 you really need 32 megs of RAM (Win 95 is faster on a 386-40 w/32 megs of RAM vs. a slow 486 with only 4 meg RAM).

Windows 95 will use a math co-pro to speed things up.

And yes, you can install and run Windows 3.0 on an 8088 with 640K. If you replace the 8088 CPU with a V20 you can use a VGA card at 640x480-16 colors (some older 16-bit VGA cards will work in 8-bit slots). Very few apps will run under Windows 3.0 in 'real mode' on an 8088/V20 but Word for Windows 1.1 and Excel 2.1 both will. (Bet you didn't think an 8088 could run Word for Windows or Excel!)

I've even gone on the Internet with a V20 12mhz. computer, some expanded memory and a cable modem connection!

the xt guy on April 17, 2008 8:25 AM

HOLA NO ENTIENDO UN CHOTO LO Q ESCRIBEN LOS YANKI PERO BUEH NADA
Q LINDO PENTIUM 1 =P PARA JUGAR AL NSF PRO STREET O EL CRISIS OPITOMO VA CON ESE MAQINON BUENO NADA AGUANTE MI PENTIUM 4 HT 3000 GH LOCO!!
VIVA ARGENTINA LA PUTA MADRE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ARGENTINA,ARGENTINA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


joel suarez

joel suarez on May 18, 2008 12:41 AM

The dude on the website (if u actually read it) changed the jumper settings to change the clock speed down to 20mhz duh. He said that when he installed xp on it it took around 4 hours. If you look, he also got it down to 8 mhz, and he has a screenshot of the task performance manager, showing the processor working constantly at 100%. I remember overclocking my old 486 dx2 66 using jumper settings up to 100mhz lol, ran hot tho :)

Mut on June 8, 2008 3:29 AM

hahahaha that would be cool if they did put it on a 20 mhz computer but the person who doctored it spelled proCessor! ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahawhahahuahahahaMAHAHAHUGAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA wow... retardds

whatafag on August 23, 2008 5:33 PM

yeah what idiots they spelled proCessor proZessor

hhahaaa on August 23, 2008 5:33 PM

yeah what idiots they spelled proCessor proZessor

hhahaaa on August 23, 2008 5:34 PM

retards, read the link. Nuff said, the guys at winhistory use a German installation of winXP. QQ noobs if you've only spent time with pentium era hardware.

iicaie on April 14, 2009 7:11 PM

if xP can run on this that means that it can run on a psp!!!

psp CPU speed is 333MHz and 32 MB of RAM!!!

............. on July 4, 2009 11:31 PM
Content (c) 2009 Jeff Atwood. Logo image used with permission of the author. (c) 1993 Steven C. McConnell. All Rights Reserved.