Installing Win7 after end of support

Sidecar Bob said:

I also have a small laptop that came with Win7 Starter and is currently running Win10 Home but very slowly. If I am going to use Win7 on the SFF desktops I'll probably try installing 7 Home on a spare hard drive to see if it runs better with it.

why Win7 Home, Sidecar Bob? can you install a higher & more powerful edition like Win7 Pro or Win7 Ultimate?

Sidecar Bob said:

...I recently decided to try to resurrect some older SFF desktop computers ... They are all from 2004 or earlier and Win10 won't install on them...

There's a (very) long thread over on Ten Forums with some tricks for installing on machines like those. Seems like a lot of hard work, but if you like a challenge... well...



Let's run Win10 on really really old hardware - Windows 10 Forums

I like challenges but computers are not my main hobby (although I do spend a lot of time sitting in front of them for stuff related to my main hobbies and listening to music on them while I work on stuff).

Why Home? After reading through this I can't see any extra features in Pro or Ultimate that I would ever use on this laptop. It is an Acer D257 (Atom N455, 1.67 GHz, 1 GB ram) so it isn't the most capable computer in the house but it is it is louder than my SW1-011 so it is handy for listening to music while I work in the garden or parts of the house where I don't already have a computer.

I put the spare HDD in the D257 yesterday and installed 7 Home Premium on it. For some reason it took a few tries before it started to install, launching Vista (it was on the drive) instead even after I pressed F12 and told it to boot from the USB drive. When it eventually booted from the USB the installation went very quickly.
It seemed to work OK except that it wouldn't connect to the WiFi. Device manager said that there were no drivers for the network adapter, the ethernet controller and something it calls "PCI device".

I'm not worried about the ethernet controller. When I got this one the pins in the ethernet socket were bent up and several were touching; I straightened them but it still didn't work so I figured something fried due to the shorted pins and bought a USB ethernet adapter to use with it (it has proven handy for downloading larger files to the tablets too).
I would have used the adapter to connect it to the internet but, of course, there was no driver for that either. It came with a driver disc but the D257 doesn't have an optical drive.



So I learned how to do something new. I googled D257 drivers on the shop computer, found them at Driverscape, downloaded the one for the network adapter, transferred it to the laptop with a USB drive and told Device Manager where to look for them. In a few minutes it connected to the WiFi and when I plugged the USB ethernet adaptor in it automatically downloaded & installed the driver for it too.


So far so good. With some help & advice from the folks at 10forums I had made Win10 perform marginally acceptably but even then it meant that I had to wait a long time for it to get around to opening windows and even longer for it to open web pages. I don't expect it to ever come close to my main computer (M58P, E8400, 3+3 Ghz, 4GB RAM, Win10 Home) but compared to the way it worked with Win10 it is positively peppy with Win7


BTW: I still have no idea what the "PCI Device" is or whether I should be concerned that it doesn't work. When I check the properties in Device Manager it gives no other description than "PCI Device".

After I typed that I got thinking that I should look at the drivers available from Acer's site. This time I used the now happily connected to the internet D257 (I'm typing this on it) so I downloaded the drivers I thought sounded promising directly to it, went to Device Manager, told it to update the drivers and pointed it to them.

The ethernet connection is trying to work but when I plug the cable directly into the laptop it shows up as "Unknown Network no internet access". Not surprised.
And when it installed the PCI driver I learned that the device is the card reader. I'll have to dig out an SD card later and see if it works.

Yeah, I knew what a PCI device was but like you I didn't know what it could be in a laptop. As I said, it turned out to be the SD card reader.
And as I mentioned in post 37 I learned how to prepare a fully updated ISO file from SIW2 and to use Rufus to prepare a flash drive to install it from. After the installation I still needed to run Windows Update to get the updates for .net framework and driver updates. After that I hid the rest of the updates it found and set it to notify me if there are new updates later (like happened with XP).

Ain't forums great?


I spend a couple of hours most days on forums helping people figure out what's wrong with their old motorcycles (& sometimes asking for help figuring out what's wrong with my own bikes). I've also joined forums for Acer and Lenovo computers to ask for help and learned virtually nothing from them.
I'm glad to see that Sevenforums and Tenforums are a lot more like the bike forums I'm on than the Acer and Lenovo ones are


Now if I could only find someone to help me fix the backlight on the Acer D250.....