United3dArtists Archive

Recently I was looking into alternative OS's that are light weight and I could run on a old laptop.
The reason was so that I could remove the combo TV/DVD player from out of my kitchen and replace it with a laptop to play the movies on.
All of my DVD's I have ripped and put onto a media server that is hooked to my tv so I can watch any one of them at any time and dont have to rummage through my DVD's to find a movie that my wife and I want to watch.
This has worked out great and so replacing the TV/DVD combo in the kitchen with a laptop that would stream the movie from the media server so like a good idea.
The only problem I ran into was that the old laptop I had only has 512 meg ram and so it doesnt play movies very well with out freezing up for short periods of time.
So I then started investigating other OS's and while there are a lot of free ones out there finding one that I could network easily and install without several problems was a even bigger task.
Well I found something amazing and was so floored to find this.
ReactOS is a free OS that mimics Windows XP/Vista and will run all windows based applications and this is the real crazy part.
The OS is only 50meg installed (WOW) I said and you can use as little as 24 meg of ram to run it.
Right now it is in the beta stage and there are some small features that do not work yet.
They are still working on fixing the sound drivers and some other small problems.
Now there is another downside to it right now, you have to have Windows XP already installed as it uses some DLL's and Kernels that MS has but they are in the process of developing their own.
So I would have to say check this one out if you are interested try the Qemu version that you can run from a flash drive.

Sounds pretty cool jeff.

It is, check it out.
Even if you dont have a old system you can play around with it on your current system.
I would suggest downloading the qemu version onto a flash drive a running it from there.
Here is a link to that version http://sourceforge.net/projects/reactos ... p/download
I just tried TS 4.3 on it and it runs great.

i would go to linux - maybe ubuntu (some version of it, xubuntu, kubuntu, etc.). But finding reactOS is a good hit... I sounds good, i hope it will not end up like the others before (Lindows, etc.). Iam going to check it.

edit: i downloaded the liveCD and it did not boot up... whole pc froze :) so maybe not alpha but i hope i can try beta one day.

Sounds great! Once tS can't work on windows, this little buddy would help out a lot =)

Bitkar try the download that I posted a link to first.
I think you will be impressed.

i will try to buy new CD-RW, the one i have is old and seems to be at the end of its life.