Windows XP Darklite 2 ?

Got myself a new PC at a vide grenier (cost a tenner, was €16 with this huge ancient CRT monitor, but no way in hell was I lugging that around so I made an offer for the box alone).
Pentium 4 clocking 2.80GHz, 1GB RAM (annoyingly it says 1.24GB as it is counting in thousands) and a harddisc of around 35GB. An HP Compaq (weren’t they separate companies once upon a time?), specifically a dc7100 sff.

The spec is basic (CD reader, floppy disc, no wifi, weird graphics card that doesn’t seem to support 16:9 aspect resolutions) but the ironic thing is that the main processor is a little under twice the speed of the eeePC and almost three times the speed of the server box. Plenty of USB ports too, which is nice.
It doesn’t do hibernate (which is unusual) but that’s not such a big deal since it is a nippy little box. Fast the start, fast to shut down. Can’t time it in use, have only had it running long enough to check that it works.

So, it is running XP Darklite 2 SP 3, a build of Windows XP that looks disturbingly like Vista. I’m guessing this is some sort of unofficial release? Has anybody here come across Darklite? I don’t suppose there is an English language version? ;-) There is a registration code for XP Pro stuck to the lid, useful?

Funny – harddisc has been reformatted and this Darklite installed. Reasonably good practice, except for the file stuck to the backdrop that provides the Livebox SSID and the WPA2 key. Um, duh. ;-)

Been a busy weekend, so I’ll play with this another day.

(for those who don’t read my blog, I picked up a basic oscilloscope the other week)

Pentium 4 clocking 2.80GHz, 1GB RAM (annoyingly it says 1.24GB as it is counting in thousands) and a harddisc of around 35GB.

Up the RAM to 4GB (XP ignores anything more)

I can’t recall whether the full collection of scripts, but if they do then:
Defragment the drives and then run cscript \windows\system32\pagefileconfig.vbs /change /i 1000 /m 1000 /vo c:
otherwise use the GUI

Unless you like twee effects, kill the themes service (you can test the effect with net stop themes)

An HP Compaq (weren’t they separate companies once upon a time?), specifically a dc7100 sff.

Buy up by HP some while back (about a decade IIRC) – adopted the worst of both.

I will stick with the 1GB for now, but I think I have found a 2×1GB to buy on Amazon. Seems Intel chipset boards need different DIMMs from others (no ECC, unbuffered, CL 2.5 or 3). It’s in my wishlist for when I can spend €28 on some memory… Samsung chips, chosen because I could see the part number and look up a datasheet instead of relying on the partial description written by the vendor.

A question – can you recommend a good Linux to try? I think I will need a LiveCD ISO image (not sure this box is smart enough to boot from USB). The ability to run Blender would be nice, I want to play with that. Extra bonus points of there is (supplied or downloadable) video editor package because it is a rather painful creating stuff using VirtualDub, then using AVIDemux to paste all the bits together. Not to mention there is no hope of a cross fade when it is done like that…

Oh, and to keep it very very loosely on topic, I guess I’d need to have a crack at running RPCEmu under Wine, right? ;-)

A question – can you recommend a good Linux to try?

Elementary is very pretty, if you like the look of Mac OS. And quite stable. Lubuntu is good for speed. Both run from LiveCDs and are Ubuntu based. If you want a bit of super-fast, feels a bit RISC OSy, Puppy Linux is fun!

I guess I’d need to have a crack at running RPCEmu under Wine, right? ;-)

“Just because you can” ;-)

Debian, because it’s just making the job.

Debian or a derivative. I have SolydX (www.solydxk.com) running on my main machine. The older one has Linux Mint Debian Edition (MATE desktop). That’s a Pentium 4/3GHz with 1GB and RISC OS on RPCEmu still runs faster on that than on any native RISC hardware I’ve owned.

RPCEmu under Wine, right? ;-)

RPCEmu’s Linux version too easy for you? :)