upgrading from XP to Windows 7 on a 8 years old pentium 4

Venkyrolls · 16 Jun 2014

CPU 2.8GHz pentium 4 with 2GB RAM and 80GB HDD with only 20GB for OS.

Right now my XP works fine very few times, mostly its struggles takes ages to open the firefox.

people said if your system is slow with XP its would literally crawl with Win 7. How True is this.

Can my system keep up with Win7 if I upgrade and Im worried about the Space required for OS.

All im gonna install is MS Office, a antivirus, a software to do medical transciption, .NEt Framework 4 and No Games at all.

ignatzatsonic · 17 Jun 2014

Download and run this tool from Microsoft. It will tell you if your hardware will meet Windows 7 minimum requirements.

Download Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor from Official Microsoft Download Center

A bare installation with no applications installed takes around 20 GB.

You might benefit from a clean install, but otherwise if it's slow with XP it will probably be slow with Win 7. Keep your expectations low with an 8 year old PC.

Venkyrolls · 17 Jun 2014

ignatzatsonic said:

Download and run this tool from Microsoft. It will tell you if your hardware will meet Windows 7 minimum requirements.

Download Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor from Official Microsoft Download Center

A bare installation with no applications installed takes around 20 GB.

You might benefit from a clean install, but otherwise if it's slow with XP it will probably be slow with Win 7. Keep your expectations low with an 8 year old PC.

I will do a clean install as suggested Thank you. Im interested in Win7 professional only. my question is will it be stable than XP.

Britton30 · 17 Jun 2014

Yes w7 is more stable than XP ever thought about, some people try to treat w7 like it's XP and therefore say bad things about it due to inexperience.

I have w7 running very well on an old AMD Sempron 1.8GHx, single core, with 2GB of DDR2 RAM.

Why would you have only 20GB out of 80GB for the OS? If you disable Hibernate and keep your Page file at no more than 2GB you can get w7 installed with updates in 17-18GB maybe. You should replace that drive with a bigger one, they are rather cheap right now. I suspect you have a 5400RPM, so a 7200RPM will make the system run faster.

AddRAM · 17 Jun 2014

As suggested, just re install XP, and use Chrome for browsing

Boozad · 17 Jun 2014

Britton's advise is good. The investment in a 500GB 7200rpm would be well worth it, remove the existing HDD and install the new one, then Clean Install Windows 7

The system will be stable, a 32-bit install would also be your best option. I don't know how much 4GB RAM would cost you, but if it's cheap enough that would be another decent upgrade and the difference would be like night and day coupled with the new HDD.

essenbe · 17 Jun 2014

I have an old Laptop with a Pentium 1.8 GHz in it, I upgraded the ram to as much as the motherboard would take and bought an SSD for it, and installed Windows 7. The difference was night and day. It was almost like having a new laptop. It is still a Pentium 1.8FHz, but the speed increase was terrific. The price of the 120 GB SSD was not a wasted buy. If I ever upgrade, I can use it in the new system. But, it runs Windows 7 well as well as Windows 8. It will never be as fast as a new laptop, but compared to what it used to be, it was an extremely worthwhile investment.

4GB was all the ram the Motherboard would take, so I upgraded to X64 Windows 7 to use all of the 4GB of ram. X86 Windows 7 will only use 3.5- 3.7Gb no matter how much ram you have. If you are going to use Windows Professional, you can use XP mode which runs XP in a VM, basically. You will be able to install and use all of your XP software on it.

gregrocker · 17 Jun 2014

Are you under a mistaken impression you must use the existing 20gb XP partition. Not only is this not necessary or wise but I would delete all partitions during the install to get it cleanest. There's no need to turn off Hibernate which is a very popular feature perfected in Win7 which all of my installeds prefer. Let the System manage the paging file.

But as advised a 120gb SSD is the greatest upgrade you can have and we see them now for $50-60 on Tiger Direct, New Egg and Best Buy.

Venkyrolls · 21 Jun 2014

I have successfully Installed Windows 7 on Pentium 4 CPU with 20GB partition and its super smooth. thank you all very much for your valuable information it really helped.. I have taked measures to prevent the OS partition from growing into full size.
Thank you all once again.

Britton30 · 22 Jun 2014

You never did answer our question as to why you are choking your OS with a 20GB partition. If you have but one drive it will consume 20GB with a small number of programs and Updates.