Uncreative Labs

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I remember something in here several years back about installing Windows 2000 on a 486. How was this done exactly? Was 2000 installed on a modern system, and then the drive moved to a the 486? Or was there some sort of flag set to bypass the CPUid? I think somebody else also had Windows XP going on a 486DX/2 -66 system. I want to run XP on my EISA box...not permanently, just to say that I did it and it was fast.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Quote:

just to say that I did it and it was fast

Nothing personal, but I think you're giving that machine far more credit than it's due...

If XP is slow on a PII, then you'll have very little fun on a 486-anything

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Don't hurt my 486's feelings. I guess "fast" is a little optimistic, but let's put it this way: with 256mb it'll be much better than any other 486 that has ran XP to date that I know of.

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

trouble is.. will 486 chipsets or cpu's support 256megs of ram?
my last 486 would allow me to plug in more then 64 megs of ram
and would clock up to the right amount,
but dod and wfwg would only see 64megs.
I have several pentium boards that are limited to 128 megs of ram ( 430 chipset)

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I'm pretty sure that my board will do 256mb. I currenty have 128mb installed, and it is all recognised by the operating system. My board was pretty high end in it's time. I guess it was supposed to be for servers or workstations. It has 16-30pin RAM slots and supports 16mb chips. The board also supports 1MB cache so that all 256mb can be cached. Additionally, I have read about other people using this board under linux with all 256mb installed.

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

there was some talk- how true it was???
that dod apps, dod and older OS would not work on really fast systems/. this was before 1g speed p4 systems.

it was commented that there were "timing problems"
from th way the programs were "coded"
i realize that some games werwew unplayable as they used the system clock rather than the real time clock.
and i know even IBM broke it's own guidelines about how programs were written. the programmers often used hardware and cpu dependent "calls" that were now supposed to be used/.

on the other side, may be xp or xp programs expect a p3 or p4 and other newer cpu's will not run on lesser cpu's.

I am just a tech and not a programmer, so I cannot speak in detail about how programs are written,
" i just know what is written in the newspaper"

Joined: 04 Jun 2006 Posts: 23 Location: Poland

XP won't support 486, but you can install it on pII and put that disk on 486.
Setup won't start on 486 even if it have 256 MB of memory.

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

I had a workstation deployment system from college that would put 2000 on a 486, best bet is one WITHOUT an Opti chipset (crashes if you use one)

Ghost I've found also works, install through the dos setup portion image during that on another system, ghost back and the 486 will setup and run 2000. It ran just as quickly as 98 did on that same PC Chips 911 amd 133 x5.

XP seems to be more problematic but you could try it the same way.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

What is "Ghost"?

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Norton Ghost

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

What about doing the initial XP installation on a modern system, and then moving it over to the 486 during the configuration process?

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

I think I was the one that mentioned it. I once took a hard disk out of a Pentium 120 that was running Windows 2000, and installed it into a 486 DX runing with a 5x86 chip, and it ran pretty well, of course, the 486 was running 64MB of EDO RAM (yes, some 486 boards DO support EDO). It booted up rather fast considering what it was.

The thing to remember about Windows 2000, is that when it came out, a Pentium 1 was still a viable system, and the internet was nowhere near as resource heavy as it is now with all that flash and java everywhere. That's half the reason I had few problems with the 486 running 2000 for awhile, I may still try it again in the future. Basically, there was less resources on 2K.

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xp20.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm&h=600&w=800&sz=30&hl=en&start=1&tbnid=l-ZPzzsvGjD6NM:&tbnh=107&tbnw=143&prev=/images%3Fq%3DWindows%2BXP%2Bon%2Ba%2B486%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26sa%3DG

There's a page where someone actually DID run XP on a 486 using a Pentium Overdrive. Quite neat actually. I think he did something similar with 98, 2000, or something.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Yeah, I did see that article a few days ago. Though, using a POD is really cheating. It is still quite interesting. That POD at 20Mhz certainly puts out far less CPU power than would say my 5x86-150. My concern is that perhaps Windows XP uses some instructions that the 486 CPU doesn't support. A POD is a real pentium chip, so even though it's running on a 486 motherboard you can't call that system a true 486. However, my guess is that if 2000 boots on a 486 so should XP. XP wasn't really a big step up from 2000 except for the "playskool" interface and other useless graphical crap.

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

I had windows 2k and windows 98se on a 386sx for a while, sadly the old compaq didn't want 16mb, it would not disable the 384kb himem area when a full 16 was installed and gave memory errors once you just got into the OS.

Joined: 28 Feb 2006 Posts: 127 Location: LI, NY

It's true, WinXP uses newer asm commands than the older processors support. They show a screen shot in the link as to which ones.

CPUID (well, that's just probably when it's checking for a pentium. Razz

)
CMPXCHG8B - compare and exchange 8 bits. That one might cause some problems...