Early Dell XP CD works well on old Dell PC's, no WPA!!!

I have an early copy of Windows XP home that came with my wife's Dell Dimension 4500 (P4 1.8 GHz) that she bought in Summer '02. It is your usuall Dell branded "reinstallation cd", that is basically an oem XP cd. Anyhow, this version is without any service packs, and comes with media player 8.

I decided to use this CD on a Dell Optiplex GX50 that I recently got running (originally given to me as it was thought to be dead from power surge. Came w/o ram, optical drive, or hard drive, but had a 1.2 GHz Tualatin Celeron on an i810E chipset--didn't think that was possible--. The computer turned out to be fine; it just needed some good low latency pc100 ram.) I figured a barebones XP OS would be what this old P3, 256mb pc100 Dell needed. This PC was probably made around ealy 2002.

After the final portion of the install, I hit F8 after reboot, preparing for the WPA crack. As I was about to apply the crack, I began to wonder if the Dell CD would work fine w/o the crack, as I had read on another forum that the Dell CD only looks for a Dell bios. If found, no WPA is needed. If it's not found, then WPA activates upon first start. My only concern was"Does the CD know what VERSION of the DEll bios it needs to find?". After thinking about that for a couple seconds, I came to the conclusion that customizing each reinstallation CD for the computer model it sold with would have been way too time consuming for Dell, so the likelyhood of WPA was low, low enough for me to chance another install if it didn't work out.

Anyway I exited out of safe mode, and proceeded to boot into windows. I was right: no WPA ever came up. I was also astonished by how little memory and pagefile were being used: only 120 MB of memory and 70 mb of page file were used at idle, and only 1.5 Gigs of hard disk space was taken up! Compare that to sp2 version of home, where it's not uncommon that 180 MB of ram and over 100 MB of pagefile are used at idle, and close to 4 gigs out of the hard disk after install.

I decided to see how low I could take XP, and ran XPLite pro. After removing all the needless programs and executables, the memory usage dropped to 70 MB, and only 53 MB in page file, and total hard disk usage was only 1.05 gigs!!!

I was so ecstatic about those results, I decided to push the experiment a little further. I also have in my possession a Dell Optiplex GX100, which uses a Celeron 433 MHz on an i810 chipset and has 128 MB of ram, and a 3.2 gig Quantum hdd. I found this computer sitting next to the dumpster. It originally had a 20 gig western digital hdd and a pci ATI rage 128 16 meg graphics card, both of which I gave to a friend to upgrad his system. This computer has an even older Dell bios, as it was manufactured in 1999.

I proceeded with the install, which seemed to take forever, mainly due to the ancient hdd. when finally finished, I let it boot into windows normally. Once again there was no WPA. I ran XPLite pro and got the same results. This setup actually runs more smooth than windows 98SE, and by far more stable than 98SE or ME. The speed when accessing files and executing programs is surprisingly quick (no slower than it was with 9x). At system idle I have 60 mb of free ram, and am only using 58 MB of page file. 8O

I would post a screenshot, but I have no way to host it. What do you guys use to host images?