Leaving XP behind on old machines

I'm thinking more along the lines of sigmatel audio and network cards.
plus not sure how well win8 will run on a single core pentium M 1.8ghz with 512mb

 

If you have the Intel 2915ABG wifi module, then I can assure you that it works great in Windows 8.

However, the Sigmatel STAC 975X AC97 might prove problematic in Windows 8...

Memory-wise, Windows 8 will be better than Windows 7 (which was better than Vista), but it'll definitely have a higher base memory consumption than Windows XP. Probably not worth trying without upgrading to at least 1 GB of RAM.

As far as CPU/GPU, Windows 8 will run fine on those specs, as long as you don't try to use Metro apps with fancy fading animations, etc.
Classic desktop works like a charm.

 

For what it's worth I upgraded a Pentium M 1.7 laptop from XP to 7 some years ago, with 1GB memory and its original hard drive, it ran really smooth. It's XP that was excruciatingly slow because of running virus + antivirus.

It's probably worth upgrading even with 768MB memory minus 32MB taken by the IGP. You can collect mini-PCI wifi cards from dead or old laptops, it shouldn't be hard to find an Intel one eventually.


The malware was industrial strength, ZBOT, developed by a team of talented programmers working in cubicles with managers and project leaders, or so can I picture it. The virus scan took hours in safe mode and then on next boot it triggered a countermeasure. Even my own XP box at home (unpatched) ended up infected.

So on XP EOL day there will undoubtedly extremely strong, powerful, sophisticated malware running away and botting millions boxes, even nation states will be busy playing that game.

 

Ms just introduced the redline bug with a recent update (cpu pegged at 100% )
http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsof...s-xp-update-svchost-redline-issue-soon-230940

 

Yup I've seen it in action with a fresh XP SP3 install. It takes like 30 mins for Windows Update to finally get a list of updates and svchost is pegged the entire time. This is on a Athlon 64 3400+ so not particularly dog slow either.

 

That explains a lot. We run some old e-mail software in an XP virtual machine and it went down the crapper after running Update last week. Ended up taking about 5 hours to rebuild the email database when it should have been 5 minutes.

At the time, I searched around and couldn't find any mention of a problem, but I suppose everyone else was trying to work out what was going on as well.

Thanks, Microsoft, for buggering up most of a day's work last week! *Shakes fist*

 

bring up taskmanager end kill svchost (only the one using 100% cpu)
is a fix for the moment