Hey I just install Windows 2000 Pro (used to have win 3.1) on a IBM 486 that our company's getting rid of, its either a P75 or a 83MHz im not sure. Has 48 megs of ram (4 rows of 72 PIN EDO SIMMS) in it and 2 gig hard drives. It is going painfully slow right now and it takes 22minutes to boot up and over night to install win2k on it and every thing like clicking the start menu / surfing the net, listning to music/simple games like solitare causes 100% CPU utilization. It has a Socket 3 processor ZIF socket in it, is there anything that i can upgrade to speed it up? PS-I already have a a good system to work with, i just like expiermenting with old equipment -Dave

I can't believe Win2k even installed on that machine. There is nothing you can do to make Win2k run acceptably on a pentium 75, nevermind an old 486. You need about a 300Mhz PII with 64MB RAM to run Win2k comfortably. You might be able to get by with a classic pentium 200-233. Jimbo

And this belongs in a DOS forum, because...

Yikes!!! Win2k on a 486?? Um, no there's not much you can do to speed things up. And I thought I was pushing my 486 when I installed win98 on it! It's amazing that you were even able to get win2k installed on that thing!! As for the P75, there's not a lot you can do there either. You could try upgrading the processor, but it's probably a socket 5 board and they maxed out at 120 Mhz. Even if you did get a 120 Mhz processor, you'd still have to deal with the lack of RAM. 48mb is definitely not enough for win2k! And odds are the old board will only support 64mb. So either way, it's going to be SLOW!!! You might want to just toss NT 4.0 on there, that should run rather decently with 48mb of RAM, and definitely FASTER than Win2k!!!! You can also try overclocking the P75 to 100 Mhz or more. I have a P75 here running at 120 Mhz, it's nice and stable.

The things people do to inflict pain upon themselves ;)

I had Win2k running fine on an old compaq prolinea server p60. Sure it took it a long time to boot up, but once booted it was functional, i should mention that it had 256 megs of ram in it.