Windows 7 on a OLD machine

[eilegz]

Today i tested Windows 7 on an pretty old laptop

a Toshiba Satellite with a very old specs

Pentium 4 2.26 GHZ Northwood

768 MB ram DDR1

40Gb Hard drive

Geforce 4 MX 420 32 mb

I'm impressed with windows 7 so far, it run almost like XP, in performance area it took a minute with 10 seconds to startup which its ok because xp almost takes 50 seconds.

Audio was not recognized but windows update found a driver and installed with those critical updates, What its really disappointing its that microsoft and nvidia could NOT provide a driver for my legacy but good old video card. After searching and google i found that a very OLD XP driver 72.30 its compatible with Vista and so i tried it with windows 7 and works ok so far.

Nvidia 72.30 driver topic

http://forum.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/8829/331431.html

thats all for now, but its amazing how windows 7 improve in performance area compared to vista, somehow a only cons that i find so far its that windows 7 its kinda instable sometimes explorer crash kinda like xp, something that i didn't experience with vista which its a very stable.

[eilegz]

Well my second day with windows 7

i installed eset nod32 2.7 version and it works very well, so i assume that version 3 will work too.

Installed opera 10 alpha and works great flash 10 installed and works as well, fired up youtube and the video run nice, even in high quality mode.

Now what its the issue its standalone video like .avi .mkv, among other video files. I tried many players like windows media player 12, media player classic, KMplayer and all freeze when i try to open a video file.

after reading some topics maybe its a OLD XP driver issue in windows 7, with Nvidia and microsoft not having a good updated driver its gonna be hard to fix, well i sent a feedback, lets hope they get it fixed soon.

[J.Sax]

I've had like results on a similar machine, though it was a desktop.

Pentium 4 3.06 GHz

80 GB HDD

768 MB DDR1 RAM

GeForce 4 MX 440

Unlike Vista, which ran extremely slow, forcing me to uninstall it and go back to XP, Windows 7 has been running as well as you describe on yours. But likewise, I have the same driver issue as you with the GeForce 4. I couldn't run anything in WMP, as the now playing mode would crash and if I tried to fullscreen something on YouTube or a similar site, I'd also get a blue screen there.

Driver issue aside, I'm pleasantly surprised by how well Windows 7 runs on such old hardware.

As a broke student this has been my main computer for several years and the beta breathed new life into it. But just yesterday I finally got a new laptop (MacBook 2.04 GHz) and Windows 7 is running like a dream on that after I got some driver issues sorted out! I can finally shut that old thing off from now on unless I'm listening to my music library.

[MeDieViL02]

seems to work slow on my 2ghz 1.25gig ram machine, bad lag in counter strike, team fortress and all that games

[Rigby]

That's an old machine? Maybe I'm getting up there myself but I was expecting this to be about running it on a Pentium III 450 or something.

[TruckWEB]

Yeah, Pentium 4, especially at 3Ghz, are not THAT old....

OLD would be Pentium 3 or the very first Pentium 4..... The main problem you have is using a crap video card with a decent CPU.

[rustix]

well i tried it on my laptop (specs in my sig) and with only WMP running it ate up a minimum of 87% processor usage and a constant 57% of RAM.. hence i switched back to XP :(

[denyboy]

It worls good on my new and old PC.

Old PC:

Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz

2 GB RAM

ATI X1650 PRO

80 GB HD

[eilegz]

Yeah, Pentium 4, especially at 3Ghz, are not THAT old....

OLD would be Pentium 3 or the very first Pentium 4..... The main problem you have is using a crap video card with a decent CPU.

well my laptop its a northwood pentium 4 so its very old.

[Borimol]

Old PC:

Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz

2 GB RAM

Old PC :D ? mmm, I think My Vaio is very very old: Core 2 Duo 1,6 Ghz with only 1GB RAM.

[Ambroos]

If my old PC hadn't crashed some months ago I'd have tried it on my P3 1.4Ghz (Extreme) and 512MB SD-RAM and a Riva TNT2 graphics card...

It ran Vista just fine :p

[Roger H. Veteran]

i have a pentium 3 1Ghz machine with only 384MB of RAM. I would have tried it on that but it uses PC133 which isn't easy to find and isn't cheap as far as i saw so i wont even bother. I was gonna buy the RAM though and use one of the other HDDs i have (old 20GB 7200RPM Maxtor) to test it on that.

[Garry]

Old PC :D ? mmm, I think My Vaio is very very old: Core 2 Duo 1,6 Ghz with only 1GB RAM.

Erm, 3.0GHz P4s are much older than your Core 2 Duo.

Also, the 3.0GHz Northwood P4 was released in April 2003 so it's nearly six years old. That's pretty ancient in computer terms. Let's not forget that six years before that we were using Pentium 233s!

[Warboy]

I got Windows 7 to run great on a Intel Mobile 1.4Ghz Single-Core laptop.

[BajiRav]

i have a pentium 3 1Ghz machine with only 384MB of RAM. I would have tried it on that but it uses PC133 which isn't easy to find and isn't cheap as far as i saw so i wont even bother. I was gonna buy the RAM though and use one of the other HDDs i have (old 20GB 7200RPM Maxtor) to test it on that.

I was able to run Win7 inside a VM with just 256 MB RAM and it was useable.

[rustix]

I got Windows 7 to run great on a Intel Mobile 1.4Ghz Single-Core laptop.

how was the performance? what was the CPU and memory usage with only WMP running and at idle?

[TruckWEB]

well i tried it on my laptop (specs in my sig) and with only WMP running it ate up a minimum of 87% processor usage and a constant 57% of RAM.. hence i switched back to XP :(

87% is high and is not supposed to be like that, something else must had be going on, maybe in the background. As for the RAM, live with it, Vista and 7, with the use of SuperFetch, will EAT all you have in RAM. It's normal behavior and it's not going to slow down your PC.

[rustix]

actually i'm quite satisfied with RAM usage.. it's just the CPU usage.. presently i've reverted back to windows XP and i do wish to reinstall windows 7 one more time.. i just need to find an easier way to backup and restore my document and specific folders without having to manually copy and paste them..

[Borimol]

Erm, 3.0GHz P4s are much older than your Core 2 Duo.

Also, the 3.0GHz Northwood P4 was released in April 2003 so it's nearly six years old. That's pretty ancient in computer terms. Let's not forget that six years before that we were using Pentium 233s!

I know that PIII is quite old but I thought 3 Ghz are more speedy than my 1,66 Ghz Core 2. ;)

[cbosdell]

I know that PIII is quite old but I thought 3 Ghz are more speedy than my 1,66 Ghz Core 2. ;)

Nope not at all. Clock speed is only one indicator or performance. The Core 2 Duos do twice as much per clock as a P4 plus you have two cores to multitask better. Not to mention more & faster memory, etc.

[stezo2k]

i think he was being sarcastic ;)

[Argote]

Just don't expect it to magically make your OLD computer be fast.

[Gamerhomie]

I tried to install 7 this morning on my 10 year old Compaq Presario but it wouldn't let me since I only had 320MB of RAM, lol. And to think it had already been upgraded. It used to only have 128.

[ViperAFK]

p4 northwood is around 6-8 years old... that's pretty old imo.

[TruckWEB]

Just don't expect it to magically make your OLD computer be fast.

Maybe not, but it should perform on par with WinXP. And (Duh!) much faster than Vista.