Hey guys...

I'm a lurker, what can I say. Normally I'm floating over at Mac forums. ANYWAY!

JUST to say I can do it, I'm thinking of trying to install a completely striped-down slipstreamed version of Vista onto the following laptop:

300MHz Pentium II (MMX)
256MB RAM
6.4GB HD
CD-ROM
2.0MB Graphics

SO the hardware sucks.... has anyone else had any luck with such old hardware?

I wouldn't put XP on that to begin with, so Vista...

WinMe ftw. Seriously, it's just 98SE without DOS if you know how to handle it. And it runs better than 98.

Well, I actually I made a very nice stripped down install with NLite "back in the day" and I've been running the Vista Transformation Pack with Windows Blinds on that... and honestly it feels pretty dang fast, I really only use it for IMing at work.

I figured it would be fun just to try it, see what happens. But I have no idea what problems to expect along the way, and whether or not it will actually work, even though its totally stripped down.

My motherboard officially supports 256MB RAM max, in most cases do you think more can be installed?

Did you tried everything?

I know how works full XP and faster nlited xp on 233MHz pc without integrated graphics.

Eh, I've already decided this is probably a dumb idea anyway with really no point to it really. Could it be done? Quite possibly, yes. What is the point of it being done? None, really. It would be slower than a dog, unstable with tons of legacy drivers, and just not fun. NOW installing it on a dual Xeon 500MHz, with 1.5GB RAM, 10k RPM HD and GeForce FX 5500 (256 MB) just might work a lot lot better....

i put nlited xp on 400mhz cellron 128mb its works fine but vista

Exactly why I decided not to do it. I think anything less than 600MHz would REALLY be pushing it. How was your performance under nLited XP? You should upgrade to 512MB RAM JUST so u can install Vista

Well its possible but i dont think you like what comes out of this little experiment.Its possible to force install on 256MB machines trough vlite tweak.The culprit in this case will be CPU speed(800Mhz single core reccommended at least) and graphics...2MB is not enough even for classic.Besides finding drivers to back it all up...hell i say.Good youre not gonna try this.

How about Windows Server 2008 Core ? That would work gracefully.

vista blows if you don't have 2 cores and 4gb ram

Vanilla?...mmm - maybe.Id say 2cores 2GB will do fine.
vLited?...1core 1GB is good.I run vlited on 2core 2GB and fairly good GPU:8800GTS

I'm quite happy with my vlited Vista SP1 on eeePC

For fun I installed heavily vlited Vista Ultimate SP1 on a 600Mhz and 128mb RAM laptop, and it works... I'll post screenshots if anyone wants to see it.

I actually tried installing it on a PII with 64mb RAM (also for fun) but I can't get past the extracting file section because it reboots into WinPE which can't fit on 64mb of RAM. I tried to disable services on WinPE (using WinPE v1 cd) and all the other stuff, but still doesn't work. I still have a few ideas left to try, but don't have time to try it.

i have installed a vlited vista ultimate on a 1.3 celeron socket370 512mb memory and it booted no slower than my dualcore... but it runs slow as a snail so i couldnt think of it on a pII... of course i have seen pII run a bit quicker than a pIII celeron.. for basic tasks

Hey, yeah that would be cool! I take it all the the scores are a 1.0 How's the stability? Any driver compatibility issues to speak of???

Stability is a mixed bag, the system is stable even with the low RAM, and maybe it is the simplistic hardware but I swear it gets to the login screen faster than my main computer (when I feel like running Vista). However I can't shutdown I'm left with a black screen with a flashing _.

The scores are not all 1.0 (surprise). Obviously the ATI Rage Mobility cannot run Aero and gets 1.0 for both Graphics and Gaming Grapics. The RAM also gets a 1.0. Surprisingly the 600Mhz Celeron processor gets a 2.9, and even more surprisingly my Hard Disk (10GB) gets a 3.1.

Now drivers... Windows does not autodetect anything, which is a surprise because I left the driver section untouched. Normally this is not an issue I grab the XP inf folder and XP's driver.cab. Because this computer is slow I don't bother extracting driver.cab (and I forgot to mention this computer's USB port is broken and it has no internet (no spare PCMCIA card lying around) and the PCMCIA USB thing doesn't work in Vista... so I'm left with CD) so I plan to extract it as needed, in XP a message will popup asking for a file. In Vista it is different, if it can't find the file it will exit with an error. So I had to guess which files it needed and spent time getting the sound and video working.

And that's about it, except for the surprisingly faster than expected bootup it is still slow.

Oh yeah none of the screensavers except Windows Logo, Blank, 3D Text and Bubbles run. Bubbles run......... though it looks very messed up.

http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2008/07/asus...a-ultimate.html

It runs pretty dark snappy in the video above, and I think it's not even vLite'd that much, if at all. Also a lot of the "vista is slow" I think is FUD. I've ran Vista fine on all my boxes just be sure to turn of indexing and you're on your way.

I would happily put it on my old P3 notebook, but I've given it away with a nLited XP that boots faster than most dual cores with default installs, people were amazed when I told them its only a P3 866mhz

My poor thread has been sitting idle for awhile! Sad! I had seen that Vista video, but honestly, its Vista running on hardware designed for it, with the right drivers, and designed to perform to the standards set out for Vista machines.

I'm thinking of installing a vLite'd install of Vista Ultimate on my 1.2GHz Celeron machine. Anyone have advice on how to make a super small ISO, or the most minimal, stable possible version? I've seen some on here that are only 700MB ISOs! That's the size I'm looking for.

I also want to try it on a machine that only has 384MB RAM, but has an Aero compatible graphics card, and I want to see how an install on there would go.

Eric

trying to install it onto a dual PII 450 with 756mb of ram, using a cf as a hd, however i get the message saying that windows hasn't found a suitable drive to install onto, i've used the modified hitatchi microdrives so vista see's it as a fixed disk, it formats it, but refuses to isntall, is there a min size for it to install to?