Windows 7, Pentium 4's and Old Systems

XweAponX · 28 Jun 2011

So far, the only P4 system I have been able to get drivers for is an old HP desktop. But there were no Windows 7 drivers for the Intel 845 chipset (which includes the video card) only XP drivers. I tried installing those XP drivers, even disabling the Strict Driver Signing fucntion and telling the install proggy to assume "Windows XP sp2" but the drivers are simply prevented from loading.

I also tried about 6 old AGP cards, and the only one that had a Windows 7 driver was the nVidia FX5200.

The system was a P4, 3.0 gHz system with 1GB of dual channel ram, which ran great once I got the Video card installed. This system is just as fast as my AMD X2 system with 2 GB Ram and PCI-E Video card, it runs very well, although you can't run more than 3 programs at once without slowing the system down,

What I want to fo is make a list of 3gHz and above P4 systems that can accept Windows 7. Because, I assumed Windows 7 had all of the previous drivers for XP all bundled in the OS like XP used to have up until Vista came out... But that is not the case, there are a lot of devices which do not have Windows 7 support, which is a cryin shame, because a lot of these systems will run great under Windows 7 UE if they only had the drivers.

SlasherIT · 28 Jun 2011

Hi,

I managed to get a 9 year old HP zd7000 series laptop which came with XP of course, 512 MB RAM (I upgraded it to 1GB of RAM), 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 Processor, NVIDIA GeForce FX Go 5600 to work perfectly fine on Windows 7. When I installed Windows 7, it took some time to find correct Windows 7 drivers for everything. For things such as the Realtek LAN, there was a Windows 7 driver. For the NVIDIA GPU, it took a lot of time to find a driver for it, and eventually I found a driver for Vista for it. All in all, it took quite some time to fix it perfectly, but when I did, it would run even better than XP (for me). I can use it for work perfectly (Word, PowerPoint, researching ect). It can even play games well such as Halo 1, Half Life 2, Generals:Zero Hour, Sims 2 ect. If you try hard to make something work well, you can certainly do it.

Slasher

theog · 28 Jun 2011

Try this way:
Driver Install - Device Manager

datapod · 28 Jun 2011

This is on an old Dell Dimension 8400 2005 ish.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Windows 7 had drivers for everything. I didn't have to install anything after Windows. :) I upgraded the CPU. It came stock with a 3.06 Ghz. P4. It came with a Radeon x300 Video card which Windows also had drivers for. Swapped that out for a GeForce 8400 GS with drivers from Nvidia.

It's a nice speedy stable machine. I recently batch converted some 2500 .WMA files to MP3 in a single pass and it went without a hitch.

Britton30 · 29 Jun 2011

I have a Dell GX280 P4 3.4Ghz, upgraded to 2GB of DDR2 RAM, works fine. I even bought a used MSI Radeon GFX card of some kind which all work with Win7 Ult x86. I believe its from 2004.

Mark Phelps · 29 Jun 2011

I recently "upgraded" an old Presario 2580 laptop to Win7 Home. It is running much better now on Win7 than it did on XP Home -- which surprised me.

Win7 was able to find nearly all the drivers needed. But, there were a couple it could not find.

However, I had expected this and went to the HP site ahead of time and downloaded all the latest XP drivers for the laptop. I was able to get the remaining drivers working by forcing the installation of the XP drivers in compatibility mode. Now, everything works.