Video of Windows 7 Installing and running on a PII 400


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Here is a video I made after seeing the "How low can it go" Article on the front page yesterday. So I decided to go really low. I went out to my shed and got a really old PII 400. I could have gone lower. All the way down to a Pro 200 but I didn't have 512 megs worth of that kind of ram and Windows 7 won't install with out 512 megs of ram or more.

So here we go!

By the way when I said "Screen Tearing, I mean artifacts"

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I already watched it when you sent it to me, I laughed at a few points during your video :D

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I would try this on my old IBM Aptiva with a Pentium 150 MHz CPU... but let's just say that it struggled to run Windows Me. Oh and the size of the Windows 7 disc is already larger than the entire hard drive itself. :rofl:

Amusing video nonetheless. :D

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how are the screen artefacts formed? Its not by the power of the graphics card right because i am using an ATI Radeon 9600Pro with Athlon XP 64bit 3500+ and 1GB Ram as my main system and Windows 7 works great.

Is it the slow CPU thats causing the artefacts?

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Pretty funny stuff. I've got an Acer C100 Tablet PC (the first convertible ones from way back around 2001) with a Pentium 3 900 MHz Mobile in it, but it maxes out at 256MB of PC100 RAM, was thinking about trying this sort of test just to see what would happen. I might do some research into gutting out Windows 7 with vLite into the smallest possible and still useful OS I can while maintaining the Tablet PC features.

Could be a nice project, but I'll wait till I get a faster hard drive for it - the original 30GB 4200 rpm drive would most certainly drag it down so slow it wouldn't be useful. The CPU at 900 MHz should be fine, actually; those Pentium 3 models were pretty snappy. But I'm guessing that with all the services Windows 7 has by default will end up crippling it in some way.

Probably just gut out XP Tablet Edition 2005 and make it as micro-sized as I can yet still useful.

Cool video though, that's just the kind of off-the-wall stuff I do: installing software and OSes on hardware that by any logic simply shouldn't be doing it. :D

Had a friend of mine install XP on a Pentium 60 with 32MB of RAM once - he hacked the **** outta most of the installer checks to get it to install. Yes it was dog slow but it worked... :D

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how are the screen artefacts formed? Its not by the power of the graphics card right because i am using an ATI Radeon 9600Pro with Athlon XP 64bit 3500+ and 1GB Ram as my main system and Windows 7 works great.

Is it the slow CPU thats causing the artefacts?

It was just because the graphics card was going bad, and nothing more.

I can't believe it actually installed... to funny

The only thing I think the install checks is how much ram you have. If you have can put 512 megs of ram in anything windows will install.

What was its Windows Experience Index rating? :p

Not sure, I tried but the it errored out said it couldn't complete.

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The only thing I think the install checks is how much ram you have. If you have can put 512 megs of ram in anything windows will install.

Anyone still got a 486 rotting away somewhere? ;)

(Although... could you already install 512MB Ram back then?)

Not sure, I tried but the it errored out said it couldn't complete.

"I really can't give this thing a rating, even 0.1 would still be too much, so i'll just throw an error." :laugh:

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I can't believe it actually installed... to funny

Well, due to the fact that, you 'can' run XP on a 8Mhz CPU, I do not why this would be surprising.

Now, what about a P 166? Now that would be something!

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I'm surprised you got 512 MB RAM.

I didn't see a machine with that much RAM until 2003 with WinXP. I know Win2000 is like the fastest OS ever with that much RAM.

Wow, that was amazing! It installed about as fast as WinXP does on some machines and behaves as fast as Vista RC1/2 does in my testing in a virtual machine with 512 MB RAM.

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Could be a nice project, but I'll wait till I get a faster hard drive for it - the original 30GB 4200 rpm drive would most certainly drag it down so slow it wouldn't be usefu

My Macbook Air runs Win 7 very nicely on a 4200 rpm drive :)

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the problem might be the directx , so it cant run the Aero parts and well the media encoding/decoding tunning :p

edit : opss i noticed that you changed to an ATI in the end , so the above coment was if it was built-in

but hey under 1 hour to install , pretty cool :p

Edited by Akaruz
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