Windows 7 Beats Snow Leopard On Older Hardware Support
Got a four-year-old Mac? Forget the newest version of OS X; Apple's Snow Leopard will only be supported on Intel CPUs. Got a PC from 2001? Windows 7 just might run on it. I tested a below-spec PC with the latest version of Windows and saw surprising results.
If you have a PC and you want the upcoming Microsoft OS, but don't want to buy a new computer, Microsoft has your back. The minimum specifications listed on the Windows 7 RC download page are a 1 GHz Processor, 1 GB RAM, and 16GB of free hard disk space. This means if you have a computer that is more than a few years old, you can still get some functionality from the latest OS rolling out of Redmond. Intel hit the 1 GHz processor mark on March 8 2000, which means theoretically Windows 7 could run on computers over 9 years old! Since Microsoft is known for understating their hardware requirements, I grabbed an old PC out of retirement and put it to test.
The PC I chose had an Intel P3 933 MHz processor, 768 MB of RAM, and an 80GB hard disk. My test subject was manufactured in 2001.
Installation was not all breezy. My first attempt stalled when the installer could not find a driver for my DVD drive. I resolved the situation by borrowing a DVD drive from a newer computer. Once Windows installed, I realized that I was stuck using the "Standard VGA Graphics Adapter" driver since Windows did not recognize my Nvidia GEForce 2 MX 200 graphics card. Desperate to use my 20-inch monitor's native 1600 x 1200 resolution, I installed the XP Nvidia driver since one for Vista is not available (Windows 7 is compatible with Vista drivers).
After a few Blue Screens o' Death, I reverted back to the built in Standard VGA driver. Thankfully, yet oddly, Windows continued to offer a 1600 x 1200 mode. Obviously using Aero was out of the question, which was to be expected. The last issue I had was that Windows 7 didn't recognize my 3COM 3C905TX network adaptor (really, Microsoft?!). Rather than hunt down a driver that might work, I threw in an Intel NIC that happened to be within arm's reach.
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Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325
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Windows 7 Beats Snow Leopard On Older Hardware Support
I have a 1 year old computer with an ARM chip in it and I can't get Windows 7 to run on it? Windows 7 must really be junk if I can't get it to run on a microprocessor it was never designed for.Can you say fanboy troll ? I knew you could.
on old hardware
I don't think I would go quite are far back as you did it is really asking too muchMy results on crappy hardware ate these on a 5 year old laptop with a crappy intel onboard graphics and a celeron(M) 1.4 after digging out a more or less compatible vista driver for the graphics it runs really well
On a socket a 1.5 (ish) desktop it run well also after upping the memory to 1gb
makes me wonder why this was not done 2.5 years ago with vista.
Windows 7 is everything vista should have been plus extras