Windows 7 on a OLD machine

By eilegz
in The Fast Ring (Insider Previews)

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Grand Master

ViperAFK

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lol, I remember when people were saying,"Vista is a new OS. Of course it will require higher system specs!" :p

that's generally true, and consider the large amount of time between vista and xp as well. Windows 7 is a much smaller release with much less under the hood changes.

The major changes were made with vista.

Rising Star

Warboy

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

It runs great, It was on a friend's laptop. So I can't give you detailed specs. But now my friend is in love because he says it runs faster then XP/Vista ever did.

Grand Master

Denis W. Veteran

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With all these reports about good performance, maybe I'll give Windows 7 another shot on my Northwood P4 Vaio.

The leaked 6956 didn't play nicely. My Radeon 9200 doesn't have compatible Vista drivers, but it might eventually since it's one of the tested hardware devices as reported in the Engineering 7 blog.

  • 3 months later...
Grand Master

eilegz

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well i revive this topic, im testing windows 7 rc1 right now on the same specs that before, i can say that the startup did felt a little bit slower compared to beta 1, but overall it feels more stable, Video bug on a non WDDM driver do not freeze anymore like previous beta 1, which its a good news, As before the Audio driver its missing from the DVD but windows update got the driver. NOD32 2.70.39 works very well and some old emulators and games that required a DIRECT 3d device worked on my geforce 4 72.30 xp driver.

Grand Master

Ambroos

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If your GeForce 4 doesn't work properly now I highly doubt it will change towards the launch of Windows 7. Windows 7 has an Aero-Capable graphics card with WDDM1.0 drivers available as a minimum requirement, so technically there is no reason for nVidia to develop a driver since there shouldn't be any Windows 7 running with a Geforce 4.

Even though it would be nice since Windows 7 is a great OS for slightly slower PC's.

Grand Master

eilegz

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well the legendary XP nvidia driver 72.30 do work on windows 7 for those pre geforce 6 video cards, bring some direct 3d and its better than standard VGA driver that microsoft ship by default.

Of course there wont be AERO glass or any aero features but do run aero basic very well. Issues so far its slower startup and shutdown compared to Beta 1 and System rating could not be rated.

Also WMP seems to be unfriendly with CCCP or any codec packs, by default WMP can play now xvid or divx but not MKV files so a codec its needed but it seems to conflict each other.

KMplayer and CoreAVC do work very well and im impressed that i could run h.264 files on this legacy machine (sure a little bit slowdown but almost not noticeable).

I think that Windows 7 will be netbook friendly as microsoft said since a netbook should be faster than my old machine, Very stable so far not a single BSOD or crash.

Rising Star

gregrocker

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I've been running it since 7022 on an old HP laptop 510 business computer, 1.2gh, 528 ram. No need to vlite due to service triggers, it runs just as well with full program. But I turn off Offline Files, edit fading, sliding and any other unnecessary graphics, turn off indexing and turn off extra features in Programs & Features. Without gadgets I can run Avast and it idles around 228mb, giving me enough ram left for light multi-tasking. I will up the ram when it needs it but since it is one of 5 computers around our small house, I doubt I'll need it.

Grand Master

Livin in a box

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I've got a desktop running 7127 with these specs:

Intel Celeron D 2.80GHz

1GB DDR1 RAM

74.50GB HDD

Intel 865G Graphics controller (onboard standard crappy one)

SoundMAX Audio Device

And it's running faster than XP with Aero basic. Pretty impressed.

Collaborator

Authentic X

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my junky old AMD 64 3000+ with 1.5 gigs ddr and a crapy ATI 9500 pro runs great with win7,and yes I can actually use all the aero effects.Boot time is far superior to XP or Vista,and no blue screens.

I think microsoft got this one right for once.

Mentor

The_Wizard

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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.

I've still got an old computer that only has 128MB RAM, it was the family computer and we only got a new one earlier this year lol.

The leaked 6956 didn't play nicely. My Radeon 9200 doesn't have compatible Vista drivers, but it might eventually since it's one of the tested hardware devices as reported in the Engineering 7 blog.

That's one of the main reasons I haven't tried 7 again since the first beta, it doesn't support my graphics card so I can't even try to run any games (solitaire made it crash :( ). Also the wireless was a pain to get working 'cause I couldn't find x64 drivers for ages.

Proficient

Thunderbuck

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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..

Windows Easy Transfer FTW!

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