Sometimes you can teach a dog new tricks....

I decided to amuse myself today and see if I could install Windows 7 Home Premium on my old PC.

Its a Dell Dimension 4600 running XP that I bought in Ireland in 2004, and according to Speccy it contains:

Intel Pentium 4 Prescott 2.4 GHz
- Socket 478
- L1 data cache 16 KBytes
- L1 trace cache 12 Kuops
- L2 unified cache 1024 KBytes
1.25GB Dual Channel DDR @ 166MHz (2.5-3-3-7) RAM
Dell Computer Corp. 0F4491 (Microprocessor) Motherboard
- Dell Computer BIOS Ver. A10 17/05/2004
- Chipset Model i865P/PE/G/i848P
- Chipset Revision A2
- Southbridge Vendor Intel
- Southbridge Model 82801EB (ICH5)
- Southbridge Revision 02
256MB RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition Graphics Card
- BIOS Version 113-AA15802-101
- ROPs 16
- Shaders Vertex 16/Pixel 16
- Memory Type GDDR3
- Memory 256 MB
- Bus Width 256 Bit
117GB Seagate PATA hard drive
- Manufacturer Seagate
- Form Factor 3.5"
- Heads 16
- Cylinders 16383
- Device type Fixed
- ATA Standard ATA/ATAPI-6
- 48-bit LBA Supported
- Serial Number 3JT46TY5
- Interface PATA
- Capacity 117GB
- Real size 120,000,000,000 bytes
- RAID Type None
- S.M.A.R.T
01 Read Error Rate 068 (063 worst) Data 000CEC5276
03 Spin-Up Time 097 (096) Data 0000000000
04 Start/Stop Count 100 (100) Data 0000000006
05 Reallocated Sectors Count 100 (100) Data 0000000000
07 Seek Error Rate 087 (060) Data 0022D9967B
09 Power-On Hours (POH) 086 (086) Data 0000003347
0A Spin Retry Count 100 (100) Data 0000000000
0C Device Power Cycle Count 098 (098) Data 0000000AAE
C2 Temperature 031 (048) Data 000000001F
C3 Hardware ECC Recovered 068 (063) Data 000CEC5276
C5 Current Pending Sector Count 100 (100) Data 0000000000
C6 Uncorrectable Sector Count 100 (100) Data 0000000000
C7 UltraDMA CRC Error Count 200 (200) Data 0000000000
C8 Write Error Rate / Multi-Zone Error Rate 100 (253) Data 0000000000
CA Data Address Mark errors 100 (253) Data 0000000000
Temperature 31 °C
Temperature Range ok (less than 50 °C)
Status Good

Apart from the graphics card which I installed in late 2004/early 2005, everything is still the original gear, and apparently still going strong.

Installing Windows 7 from a USB drive was a doddle (I honestly cannot think of anything easier), and, I'm pretty sure this ins't a placebo effect, but this old girl actually runs better than she did under XP. The only issue is Windows doesn't recognise the sound card (I think its a Creative Labs Live something-or-the-other), but nothing that $30 cannot sort out.

This is the WEI - not half bad considering the old girl is 7 years old.



Windows 7 just never ceases to amaze me - I honestly never expected this old dog to run so well with a modern OS

Regards,
Golden

Abit young.

P3 with Windows 7

It runs well in VBOX and VMWare Player as well with about that WEI.

Yeah, it's great fun installing Win 7 on older hardware. Here's the specs of my P3:


This machine only scores 1.0 on the WEI due to the graphics (16M video RAM!):


Even with this low of a WEI it runs surprisingly well, at least for browsing and other lightweight tasks.

As far as I know, everything on this machine is as it came from Dell. It has a COA sticker for Win 2000.

I gonna try that with an old presario compaq and see if we can get it working that would be something fun to do..

I've run Win7 rather well on a laptop with a PM 1.4ghz processor, 512mb ram, and a Radeon Mobility 9000 graphics card (played some online games rather well too).

Right now I'm running it on a laptop with a 1.7ghz PM, 1 gig of ram, and an Intel 915gm. It runs minecraft pretty well, I've noted.

My desktop is a P4 Prescott 3.2ghz, 2gb DDR ram, and a Radeon X1650 Pro, and with some tweaking I've maxed Portal 2 on it with decent FPS.

Windows 7 is awesome.

Wow! There are some real old dinosaurs running around. Yes, you too A Guy

Hey! How did I get in this conversation!

A Guy

A Guy said:

Hey! How did I get in this conversation!

A Guy

Click to expand...

Oh, well the words dinosaur+old did it hahaha

Golden said:

The only issue is Windows doesn't recognise the sound card (I think its a Creative Labs Live something-or-the-other)

Click to expand...

Hooray for on-board sound! To heck with this Creative Labs Live SB0200 fossil.....

On to my next education...partioning an existing drive

Did you try installing the Win XP drivers.
How to install XP drivers:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/97061-driver-install-device-manager.html

Oh. No, I didn't even consider that, in fact I didn't even know it was possible. I'll definately give that a crack - thanks theog.

You are welcome, mate.


Not all we oldies are old dinosaurs, some are young dinosaurs.

Golden said:

A Guy said:

Hey! How did I get in this conversation!

A Guy

Click to expand...

Oh, well the words dinosaur+old did it hahaha

Click to expand...

Then you are 10 years from dinosaur

A Guy

Haha

Golden said:

I decided to amuse myself today and see if I could install Windows 7 Home Premium on my old PC.

Its a Dell Dimension 4600 running XP that I bought in Ireland in 2004

Click to expand...

Congrats, Golden.

I have a machine with a 1.0 GHz AMD Thunderbird processor plus 512 MB of RAM, and I've sometimes wondered how well 7 would run on that box.

I've got it running on an Athlon XP 2400+ with 1.5GB RAM. It worked fine with only 1GB until I found a spare stick when I did my Spring cleaning earlier this Summer.

(Yes, I meant to say that last part - shoot me, I'm slow...)

Update.....

I continue to tinker with this dinosaur. I've now learn't to resize and add partitions (using Partition Wizard 7), installed Linux Mint 11 in a dual boot (using EasyBCD), and she is still going strong.

Big thank you to Dave76 for his help with PW7 and EasyBCD.

I wonder what I could do next.....

Been there done that with a Dell Dimension 4550, except it didn't have 256MB of RAM, more like 64. Man, I wish I had that with I was using that old son of a gun!