Coding Horror

programming and human factors

The World's Slowest Windows XP System

I'm not sure exactly why, but the guys at winhistory.de managed to install Windows XP on a 20 megahertz Pentium 1 system with 32 megabytes of RAM:

The system info dialog for the world's slowest XP install

That puts the XP in back in Windows XP -- Xtremely Pokey:

The CPU is working at 60% of full capacity at the Desktop! Nowadays with a modern CPU you have to run many tasks in background to reach such a high level of work.

For this reason you had to have patience, very often. Do recognize the changing of the blue color on the screen before the "Welcome"-page?? At 20 MHz you can see all 8 blues line by line!

Great stuff. The actual minimum system requirements for Windows XP are a 233 MHz CPU and 64 megabytes of RAM. But even a 20 MHz Pentium is still orders of magnitude more powerful than this Osborne Executive:

Osborne laptop ad

Most people associate Osborne Computers with the Osborne Effect-- pre-announcing the next model too early and decimating the sales of your current models. But as it turns out, that's an urban legend.

Written by Jeff Atwood

Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here: https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror