Windows 7: A New Chance for Old Computers?

Windows 7 and Less Powerful Computers - A Match Made in Heaven?


Since the release of Windows 7, there have been reports from the far reaches of nerd-dom that Windows 7 is lighter on its feet than Vista. In some cases, on older computers, Windows 7 not only beats Vista in terms of performance, but also Windows XP. Let's look at benchmark test results from the experts themselves:
John Breeden II, lab director for Government Computer News, says in an article titled "Can Windows 7 Resurrect Ancient PCs" (emphasis mine),
"For a laptop PC running Windows XP with a 900 MHz Pentium M chip and 512M of RAM, the benchmark score was 155. Once we upgraded to Windows 7, that score increased to 184 — a significant improvement. In general, the laptop PC seemed to work more efficiently with Windows 7.On older systems, the performance increase was even more noticeable. On a Pentium II MMX desktop PC running Windows 98, we piled on memory to get it up to 2G. The first benchmark score was an abysmal 56.8. Upgrading to XP didn’t do much: The next score was 68. However, the jump to Windows 7 increased it to 83, and it wasn’t just an improvement in benchmark numbers — programs opened noticeably faster."
Ed Bott, industry expert and blogger for ZDNet, writes, "Windows 7 uses less RAM and disk space than Vista...With identical configurations, Windows 7 was dramatically faster at starting up and shutting down than Vista, and some routine tasks that would grind the Vista machine to a halt completed without incident on the Windows 7 machine."
The systems tested by the above-mentioned authors are somewhat extreme cases, of course, and both of the authors noted serious challenges trying to install Windows 7 on really old machines (lack of DVD drives and old, non-supported video cards being two of them).
But for those of us who have computers more than a couple of years old, Windows 7 looks like a much better option to stay current than Vista was.

Source: http://ittrainingtips.iu.edu/windows...puters/08/2009