Windows 7 on OLD computers

I've been running Win7 on my home threatre pc and more recently my desktop, and I've been thinking of installing it on my old laptop. It's a Fujitsu Lifebook and I'm not sure if I should. It's a 1.7ghz AMD Athlon XP 2200+, 512mb RAM shared with an onboard ATI Radeon EGP 320M (currently using 16MB.

Do you think it would run alright? Especially with Aero (I doubt it would let me but I guess I could force it to test it out). It's currently running XP pretty sluggishly, and I thought Windows 7 might be a slight improvement but I'm not sure. It couldn't run any worse than it does not (I hope).

I've installed Win7 on my laptop, 1.6GHz Pentium M, 1GB ram, Intel 855 chipset, 4200 rpm HD.

I think it is slower with Windows 7 compared to a fresh Windows XP installation. But I'm not sure. Aero doesn't work. When the laptop is started, it runs fine, but my hard drive work hard on start-up.

Using hibernation helps a lot for start-up time.

Actually, on my Thinkpad, I've noticed it run things alot faster and my download times have increased from around 500KB/sec per site to around 1.5MB/sec. Not to mention it seems to run more fluid, especially when you install and run a bunch of programs.

This is where I was experiencing the limitations of XP. The more programs I run, the slower it got. I had a gig of memory free and was still slowing down.

After I switched to Win7, I haven't had those problems since. Sure, I don't have Aero on most of my systems, but who cares. I prefer stability than eye candy anyday.

Oh, and Rusty, I have Win7 running on a Latitude C610 (PIII@1.2GHz, 1GB RAM, 40GB HDD, 16MB Radeon). No problems here and it runs really good.

Dual booting XP & Win7 x86 on an IBM/Lenovo x40.
Pentium M, 1.4 Ghz
1.25 GB Ram
Index is 1.0 (hehe)

I LOVE IT ! ! !
It's just as snappy as XP, if not a litttle more so.
IE 8 is a winner too. (ditched IE7 after a week of testing.)

Simba7 said:

Actually, on my Thinkpad, I've noticed it run things alot faster and my download times have increased from around 500KB/sec per site to around 1.5MB/sec. Not to mention it seems to run more fluid, especially when you install and run a bunch of programs.

This is where I was experiencing the limitations of XP. The more programs I run, the slower it got. I had a gig of memory free and was still slowing down.

After I switched to Win7, I haven't had those problems since. Sure, I don't have Aero on most of my systems, but who cares. I prefer stability than eye candy anyday.

Oh, and Rusty, I have Win7 running on a Latitude C610 (PIII@1.2GHz, 1GB RAM, 40GB HDD, 16MB Radeon). No problems here and it runs really good.

Ah thanks. It's a school laptop and I mainly use it for work and what not, but it takes its time even doing the simplest of tasks. I think I will chuck WIN7 on there. How would it operate with forced Aero (I heard you can do this)?

Rusty100 said:

Ah thanks. It's a school laptop and I mainly use it for work and what not, but it takes its time even doing the simplest of tasks. I think I will chuck WIN7 on there. How would it operate with forced Aero (I heard you can do this)?

How can you "force" Aero???

Simba7 said:

I was wondering that same question. I know you can do it with early betas of Vista, but I doubt it with 7.

You can't do it anymore. I researched this extensively to see if I can force it on my i915 chipset.
If the video card doesn't have the "hardware scheduler" feature, it just won't work unless somebody manages to hack Windows system files to disable that requirement (which at least one person is already trying to do, but the outlook is bleak).
Hardware scheduler apparently allows it to multi-process desktop effects with other video acceleration more efficiently, although Aero does seem to work just fine on the 915 video chip judging by the early Vista betas I used to have.

Wilson said:

You can't do it anymore. I researched this extensively to see if I can force it on my i915 chipset.
If the video card doesn't have the "hardware scheduler" feature, it just won't work unless somebody manages to hack Windows system files to disable that requirement (which at least one person is already trying to do, but the outlook is bleak).
Hardware scheduler apparently allows it to multi-process desktop effects with other video acceleration more efficiently, although Aero does seem to work just fine on the 915 video chip judging by the early Vista betas I used to have.

Oh thank you for the information, I won't spend more time on this.