Which operating system for a Pentium II?
I have a recently built system with a 400MHz Intel Pentium II that I'd like to use. Which OS would be best for it? I'd like to use Windows 2000, but I think it may be a bit too slow to use. I may have a Pentium III lying around, I'll have to see. The system has 768MB RAM and a 40GB HDD.
Comments
What are you planning on using it for? Anything specific?
2000 will run alright on a PII.
Other options are NT4 or the 9x series.
Mostly music playback and some games.
For games, I'd go with 98SE. It will be faster and lighter on the PII and give you a wider range of support. Just be sure to check the DMA checkboxes on the hard drive and CD-ROM in the device manager!
Also if you are going with 98SEm install QuickTime or K-Lite Codec Pack and some version of the WMP or even VLC, so you can play many multimedia files
I vote for Windows 95 OSR 2.5. As far as a Pentium II goes, it can do everything that 98SE does, and with a faster, less bloated shell (if you use task manager to kill the "Windows needs more information to install" on first bootup to the desktop). You'll have FAT32, DMA and AGP support with the extended USB supplement.
If you have a VIA chipset, I would stay away from the win95 USB supplement, which ended up destroying the 95 install on an IBM 300GL PIII-500. In that case I dual-booted with Windows 2000 to use USB flash drives (which ran fine except for web browsing).
I'm prejudiced against 98 because it's been very quirky and unstable on my hardware compared to 95 and 2000; whilst my aunt's Celeron-300 ran 98FE as a daily driver for six years without issue. So I think it won't hurt to try 98SE though.
You can achieve the same speed with 98 using 98 lite to remove the IE desktop from Win98, and you'd also get the benefits of 98 without a buggy, unstable, IE based shell
XP may work. Try that.
I've tried XP before. It has issues installing, and it's quite slow.
Oh. Maybe try Windows me.. k i was joking try windows 98 se.
I agree with most others that Windows 98SE is an excellent choice for a Pentium II when it comes to gaming. If you feel like it's not enough to satisfy, you can always dual-boot with either some NT-based Windows version (either NT4 or 2000 are my choices here) or some other exotic OS (like a compatible Linux OS).
If you have enough spare time, you can also try various different operating systems/Windows versions to see which one suits you the most.