A few years back, if someone asked me “How much RAM do you need to run XP?” I’d probably say 256MB is fine, but 512MB will make things run great. That was a few years ago.

Fast forward a few years, and well I only use Windows when I have to, usually in a virtual machine. But my brother wanted to borrow one of my old laptops I no longer use. I thought the old T40 I have would be OK. It only has 256MB of RAM. It had linux on it, but I had the IBM Windows restore DVD set, so I thought I’d just put XP back on it.

Well, sure its taken me the better half of a day to just install the thing from this DVD set, but the more amazing thing is just how amazingly slow it is. I am gobsmacked. XP was never this bad I thought. Sure IBM’s DVD set includes lots of rubbish like Norton Antivirus and a bunch of IBM this/that and whatever software. And I am slowly removing most of it, but it is just really bad. With virtually no apps running, I ran Windows Update and it gave me warnings about it running out of virtual memory while trying to install the SP3 update. Thats just silly.