Thinkpads Forum

i was wondering about the system requirements to run windows 2000 , and is it alot better than windows 98 second edition ?. i posted earlier about the 770 , trying to play dvds on it and the pic being choppy , im not sure if it has the deva card yet , where would i look to see ? its a 770 w/ a pentium processor and windows 98 , 128 megs of ram and a 4 gig harddrive , i read you can pla dvd's w/ windows media player 9 and was curious as to where i could get it , or should i just look to download windows 2000 ,
thanks john

It may be not be possible to get Windows 2000 anymore - I don't know for sure. But you will find it sluggish on that machine. Slow processor and 128Mb of ram are the limiting factors. Windows 2000 *is* much better than Windows 98 - no question about that, though. .... JDHurst

If the DEVA is installed,there will be 3 little ports directly under the main battery.....

Later....Greg St.L

I have an original 770/DEVA with 224MB RAM on Win2k. Performance is sluggish at best, even for web surfing and e-mail. (And I'm making that comparison with an A21p, not a something current, BTW.)

Forget movies. I can't even get MP3s to play cleanly from the HD using Windows Media Player (WinAmp is OK) let alone videos.

jdhurst wrote:It may be not be possible to get Windows 2000 anymore - I don't know for sure.

Actually you can, if you're determined to have it http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=5331

ok thanks for the advice .

I don't know what if you were thinking you computer was too slow but i ahd windows 98 SE on my Toshiba with 64 megs of ram. It would often shutdown on me probably because of all the p2p, updates, and other random stuff i dowloaded over the past four years. I went to windows 2000 the system never shut down. The only thing i did was put office XP, and my pritner on it. It worked pretty well. It was a little slower but more stable so i think it might have been just as fast. I als had a 4 gid HD. WHen I had windows 98 se i had so much crap and music on it i only had about 400 MB or space left on my HD. On my windows 200o i downloaded so much music and a movie onec that I hd actuall gone down to like 97 mb of space on my HD. Windows 2000 at the same speed as if i had 4gig. SE shutdown. So with 128 ram and a reformat you should be alright. Also you may not nee doffic XP but a slower one. Also for office i only installed word and excel.

I've used Windows XP on a 266mhz Thinkpad 600 with 288 mb RAM, 5gb hard drive, and can say that performance is fine for web surfing and general computing tasks. The only problem I've had is the 266 mhz cpu is not powerful enough to play some DivX avi videos, although .mpg (MPEG-1) or VCD video plays fine.

The OS aint the major issue for playing videos. Any OS can be stripped down to perfrom decently on these old machines. I have even got XP to run and let me browse with Firefox 2.

The main thing is free memory and background CPU usage, AND the resolution of the video, mainly the width no matter 4:3 or 16:9...
Notice that at the time "high performance" was still at 352x240 the audio was a higher rate then most on youtube today, same with frames per second and video bitrate.

On my desktop machine I use a greasemonkey plugin for youtube, if I choose to view that 2nd youtube vide in low resolution flv... STILL almost twice the resolution of "good" videos in the Windows 95 era...

Forgive the subject of the next video... but notice the fmt strings at the end of the following url's...

Original quality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzU9OrZlKb8&fmt=38
Very low quality flv: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzU9OrZlKb8&fmt=5
Medium quality MP4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzU9OrZlKb8&fmt=18

Numbers my script use are:
5 - flv, low quality
35 - flv, high quality
38 - original, like clicking on the link with no format specified
18 - mp4, medium
22 - 720p, mp4
37 - 1080p, mp4
[EDIT: As of December 2010, these fmt strings don't work in the url anymore, the greasemonkey plugin http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33042 works for me still]

So in conclusion, Windows 98 (tweaked for performance), Firefox 2 (Minimal plugins), greasemonkey with a script to set &fmt=5 on youtube... still wider, but better
Local files, export to play on an iPod @ 240 width (I have a custom job set up in MythTV to do this for me)

As an aside to the previous poster... EXACTLY...
MPEG-1: 352x240, 352x288, or 320x240 with a bitrate of 1.5MB/s or less
VCD: # Codec: MPEG-1 Resolution: NTSC: 352x240
DivX Mobile profile: 320x240×30 (being the "some" DivX)
Mobile Theater, Home Theater, HD 720p, HD 1080p, +HD 1080p profiles: being the ones that look like slideshows or worse

I have run W2k on a PI 266 and 256mb PC100 just fine. No issues but I was not pushing it.
Officially:
# 133 MHz or more Pentium microprocessor (or equivalent). Windows 2000 Professional supports up to two processors on a single computer.
# 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM recommended minimum. 32 MB of RAM is the minimum supported. 4 gigabytes (GB) of RAM is the maximum.
# A 2 GB hard disk that has 650 MB of free space. If you are installing over a network, more free hard disk space is required.

I have a copy of W2kPro, your welcome to. It is a copy i.e. burned from the original. I also have Salvaged serials. These machines were destroyed several years ago in a hurricane. The only hiccup I have found with the salvage serials is they were not broken down between OEM and retail, so you may need to try more than 1. I also have an Office 98 Small Business Edition.

Let me know if I can help (it will be cheap)

Ron

Some old tips for optimizing Win2k for very low RAM:
http://www.nexle.dk/win2000-32mb/

I was still running 2000 as my primary OS until around two years ago.

For anyone else who might google across this in the future...

Videos typical on the net in 1997:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/mis ... 94/movies/
dated Apr-Jul 1997
Video: MPEG1 Video 240x180 25.00fps

P2 300 MHz Pentium II Released: May 7 1997, So that was THE fastest anyone had, Most likely had a P1 200 MHz which was released about a year earlier in June 1996.

This should give some idea of what playing DVD's is asking a system todo when these videos were typical of the times

FWIW, just some other info