Forums Forums Enthusiast Forums A - Z Gadgets & Tech TinyXP

Hi all,

Thought i would share this as i found it interesting.

My dads laptop had started to become very slow at running day to day things like the internet. I took it away to have a look and to my surprise he hadn't installed anything on it. after giving it the usual cookie clean up etc it was still very poor. I came across TinyXP Rev 11. although the edition isnt a genuine Microsoft release There is no problem with installing this if you have a genuine Key (you can change the key to match your purchased one once installed.)

upon installation i found that only 17 processes where running when the system was idle. using just 60meg of ram. to put this in to comparison a fresh install of Windows 7 on idle uses 911 meg of ram and has 49 running processes. The system can be updated but i just installed the latest Firefox and some windows security updates. I also installed MSN Live with APatcher (this removes alot of the advertisements and what have you from MSN)

Now with Mail, MSN and Firefox open and browsing the system runs at 120meg. its is very smooth very very fast and with the latest Firefox it is capable of giving you a full internet experience.

Thought i would share this with anyone who has an old "slow" PC or netbook. oh and it uses about 700meg of hdd space.

Even for a cut down system that's really really low idle memory usage. Cheers for the link.

I use a cut down version of Win7 Ultimate that I image with my own apps installed and the lowest I can get that idling at is something like 480mb with basic themes still on. Never managed to get Winxp below 90mb or so.

Apparently there are a few win 7 lite versions or "tiny 7" but they will never get anywhere near to this version in terms of resource hunger. The version of XP comes with IE6, this is also unusable and i would stear clear of ie9 or 8 on a "lite" machine. stick with firefox or chrome.

Incidentally there is also a version of XP called Micro XP. I would advise most users to stay away from this release as it is even smaller and uses even less memory, it comes minus some things though like printers, any drivers etc so you really will have to know how to get it usable and will probably end up still with something around the same as tiny XP.