How low can you go.... (old hardware)

Judas · Feb 9, 2011, 09:30 PM

Ok, so since the birth of windows vista and now windows 7..... i've been playing with what i see come in and what people have thrown away...

old machines.... revived with a few upgrades and updates and then slapped with windows 7 either 64bit or 32bit home premium.

This may be all and boring and there are quite frequently tons of crap out there about how windows xp or windows 98 would be faster, snappier..... better on those systems and how vista/win7 would be just a sluggish hunk of garbage.

I beg to differ..... considering the old 486 and 64mb of ram 1038mb hardrive solution i was running windows xp on...... i've made due with that even while still posting on driverheaven.. mind you when it came to flash on at that time on that machine... it was murder.. but otherwise i could still browse within reason of being comfortable.

I've recently played around with Pentium IIs and K6-2s with windows 7..... surfice it to say... manageable..

but i also recently managed to snag the following:

An AMD Athlon Socket A 800mhz
Asus A7V (orginal)
Came with a Geforce 1 or something it appears.. looks oem.... either way windows 7 doesn't seem to like it one bit... standard vga only for all the different crap i've thrown at it.

replaced it currently with a HD4650 AGP card.... works surprisingly well too

Slap a better PSU in it... of course a 500watt coolermaster that was semi broken and fixed somewhat.... works either way....

creative sound card that windows 7 doesn't like..... not surprised...

replaced the 15gb ide hd with a 250gb which OMG.... with a bios update.. managed to work flawlessly...

The promise ATA100 onboard controller is a fail... BSODs and crashes win7... had to disable.... stuck on the onboard ATA66..... no problemo..

If theres interest.... i'll post some results.... maybe see if 3dmark vantage will pull a score or something lol.

Tyrsonswood · Feb 9, 2011, 11:28 PM

I ran Win7 beta on a dual CPU Pentium III system for a while.

Takaharu · Feb 10, 2011, 07:51 AM

I was surprised to find that Win7 runs stupidly well on systems that an updated XP struggles with. At work we have P4 machines running XP with 512MB RAM and most of them are crying for higher specs - even a memory upgrade to 1GB doesn't provide much of an improvement.
These machines range from P4 3.2GHz to Celeron D and a few other Celeron systems. The speed is a joke.

Last year I made a PC with 1GB RAM, P4 3.2GHz processor, onboard graphics and slapped Win7 on there. It works like a dream and even Aero runs seemlessly. I knew Win7 would run on it but I didn't expect Aero too. Remarkable is all I can say, really.

If you look at it comparatively, XP's minimum spec is a 233MHz processor with 64MB RAM. So these machines at work have processors over 13x more powerful than minimum spec and 8x the minimum RAM yet they struggle. Windows 7, however, runs rather well on a PC with 1.2x the processor speed (1GHz minimum) and the same RAM. As proven many times, however, XP's recommended spec should actually be much, much higher and Windows 7' minimum spec should be much lower (P3 systems, for example).

Judas · Feb 10, 2011, 04:44 PM

Well look at the efficiency of it..

Windows xp is a bit of a load hog...

The engine is a considerable bloated compared to what i've seen with windows 7...

It is noticeably faster..

Also with Aero glass enabled.... provided with a decent gpu..... it seems to free up even more ram or make things work smoother too (offloading onto the gpu rather then sucking up cpu juice/ram)

blibbax · Feb 10, 2011, 04:51 PM

I still have a K6-2 motherboard, CPU and RAM lying around which this might be worth trying with. No case for it atm though.

Although I plan to put 7 on the P4 rig shortly, I still don't actually have it on my main PC - it doesn't seem worth the hassle when I have a legit Vista Ultimate installation that's been working so well for nearly 3 years now.

On that note, my main PC is no god in the e-peen stakes, yet Vista runs really well. I've seen similar PCs with XP grind to a halt, but a lot of it's about having a well maintained PC without too much bloatware etc.

**synthesis204** · Feb 11, 2011, 05:01 AM

I can barely remember anything pre PIII. Damn my age T.T

I believe there was also a reviewer somewhere on the web who was testing what the lowest mhz you could run Win7 on was...I'll see if I can dig it up.

Edit: Not what I was looking for, but close.

http://www.techspot.com/news/35164-w...ibased-pc.html

Edit 2: This is what I was looking for, although it's for XP:

http://winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm

Judas · Feb 11, 2011, 05:39 PM

after runing into numerous stability issues..... i've finally reset cmos back to fail safe defaults... then manually changed only a few settings and disabled the hardware..

now it's working 100%...

Windows 7 refuses to run the tests to give me a score though.. not sure why....

I don't have a soundcard that'll work.. my have to get a cmedia card.... I've a SB0060 sound blaster live! digital card...... but like all creative sound cards.. they are garbage and have little to no support...

Takaharu · Feb 11, 2011, 07:38 PM

Judas - how much memory is in that bad boy?

Judas · Feb 11, 2011, 07:48 PM

thought i mentioned it.. but orginally i had 512mb.... but atm.. 1280mb.. (2x 512 + 256)

Feb 10, 2011, 07:51 AM	#3
Takaharu I can fart in 7 languages Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: England, UK Posts: 1,862 Rep Power: 113 System Specs	Re: How low can you go.... (old hardware) I was surprised to find that Win7 runs stupidly well on systems that an updated XP struggles with. At work we have P4 machines running XP with 512MB RAM and most of them are crying for higher specs - even a memory upgrade to 1GB doesn't provide much of an improvement. These machines range from P4 3.2GHz to Celeron D and a few other Celeron systems. The speed is a joke. Last year I made a PC with 1GB RAM, P4 3.2GHz processor, onboard graphics and slapped Win7 on there. It works like a dream and even Aero runs seemlessly. I knew Win7 would run on it but I didn't expect Aero too. Remarkable is all I can say, really. If you look at it comparatively, XP's minimum spec is a 233MHz processor with 64MB RAM. So these machines at work have processors over 13x more powerful than minimum spec and 8x the minimum RAM yet they struggle. Windows 7, however, runs rather well on a PC with 1.2x the processor speed (1GHz minimum) and the same RAM. As proven many times, however, XP's recommended spec should actually be much, much higher and Windows 7' minimum spec should be much lower (P3 systems, for example). __________________ I don't get paid to know the answer, therefore I'm far more likely to give you a straight and honest answer. Mods Rig, Box Mods Rig, Folding details Last edited by Takaharu; Feb 10, 2011 at 07:56 AM.

Feb 10, 2011, 04:51 PM	#5
blibbax What does this do? Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: Oxford, UK Posts: 4,262 Rep Power: 254 System Specs	Re: How low can you go.... (old hardware) I still have a K6-2 motherboard, CPU and RAM lying around which this might be worth trying with. No case for it atm though. Although I plan to put 7 on the P4 rig shortly, I still don't actually have it on my main PC - it doesn't seem worth the hassle when I have a legit Vista Ultimate installation that's been working so well for nearly 3 years now. On that note, my main PC is no god in the e-peen stakes, yet Vista runs really well. I've seen similar PCs with XP grind to a halt, but a lot of it's about having a well maintained PC without too much bloatware etc. __________________ Donate the spare computing power of your PC to help to cure Alzheimer's, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease and cancer: Fold for HH!

Feb 11, 2011, 05:01 AM	#6
synthesis204 Moderator Join Date: Sep 2010 Location: St. Louis, MO Posts: 1,177 Rep Power: 99 System Specs	Re: How low can you go.... (old hardware) I can barely remember anything pre PIII. Damn my age T.T I believe there was also a reviewer somewhere on the web who was testing what the lowest mhz you could run Win7 on was...I'll see if I can dig it up. Edit: Not what I was looking for, but close. http://www.techspot.com/news/35164-w...ibased-pc.html Edit 2: This is what I was looking for, although it's for XP: http://winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm __________________ Donate the spare computing power of your PC to help to cure alzheimers, ALS, huntington's, parkinson's disease and cancer: Fold for HH! Last edited by synthesis204; Feb 11, 2011 at 05:07 AM.

Feb 11, 2011, 07:38 PM	#8
Takaharu I can fart in 7 languages Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: England, UK Posts: 1,862 Rep Power: 113 System Specs	Re: How low can you go.... (old hardware) Judas - how much memory is in that bad boy? __________________ I don't get paid to know the answer, therefore I'm far more likely to give you a straight and honest answer. Mods Rig, Box Mods Rig, Folding details