On how old of a machine could a person install Windows 7 Pro?
I know there are minimum requirements, but that was also the case with Vista, XP, etc., and one could always tweak Windows to work on the legacy hardware (by removing the flash/pizazz, etc.)
We have a lot of legacy hardware in our office, varying in hard drive sizes, with anywhere between 256 to a gig of ram.
Everything is running XP Pro now.
I shudder slightly at the thought of running XP on a PC with 256MB of RAM. I've seen it on a couple of machines (new in 2002) lately, and both suffered delays which appeared to be due to excessive use of virtual memory. 512MB was better. 1GB was much better.
You may be able to get Win7 to run on machine with less than the stated requirements. Finding usable drivers may be the main concern.
I recommend that you stay with XP. It'd be much more useful to upgrade the RAM in each machine to 512M or more. I forget how long Microsoft will continue to support XP at the current level, but I believe that it's at least four years.
Microsoft is supporting XP until 2014. If I were you, with the machines you stated....I'd stick with XP.
The reason for the long support cycle is the business that just bought XP in the last year or so, and the other companies that plan to wait until Windows 7 has a service pack out and is tested. This gives MS time to make some cash off the service agreements for XP since its been around awhile and Windows 7 proves its self to the business groups that like to drag their feet with all due respect.
The available XP support available until 2014 is security fixes only and paid support so this may well tempt some to upgrade :)
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