Windows 7 on OLD computers

[hkancyr]

Here is my ABIT IC7-Max3 with a P4 EE 3.4Ghz. Windows 7 seems rather snappy on this thing.

[img=http://img118.imageshack.us/img118/6567/extrememb3.th.png]

 

[MilesAhead]

Here is my ABIT IC7-Max3 with a P4 EE 3.4Ghz. Windows 7 seems rather snappy on this thing.

[img=http://img118.imageshack.us/img118/6567/extrememb3.th.png]

Out of curiosity what's the HD on your rig? Seems like that's usually the boat anchor on these indexes but yours scores high.

Also we should keep in mind most people when they finally buy a PC off the shelf will likely get Home Premium preinstalled. The beta we're playing with is Ultimate. The default install may not be so tuned in Home Premium. I know my Vista Home Premium wasn't.

 

[hkancyr]

Yeah Miles, I thought it was high also. When I installed Win7 on this very same drive in my Badaxe2 mobo it scored a 3.0 I believe. It is a Hitachi Deckstar HDS721616PLA300, which I thought was a SATA1 when I saw the score on the XBX2. Strange, but I 'm not too convinced that the WEI scores are all that relevant as benchmarks. It is plugged into the intel connectors as it wouldn't boot from the Silicon Image connectors. The Abit IC7 Max3 mobo has 6 SATA1 conectors 2 Intel 4 SI.
Whatever... this system runs great with Windows 7 and when it finally comes out I will run it that way.

 

[Scooter70]

I have Win7 running in a dualboot with XP Pro on my P4 2.8GHz machine (2GB ram, GeForce 7300GT). My WEI score is only 1.8 for the processor but the others scores are 3-5.5. So far, so good. My PC is only used for web surfing, Quicken, and some light picture editing so I'm happy with its performance.

:sarc: a 1.8 for the processor? My P3 gets that. I don't think the WEI is accurate.

Hmmm.... I just re-ran it and this time my processor got a 3.7! I think they might just have a random number generator creating these scores. :sarc:

 

[MilesAhead]

@hkancyr if it feels fast then it's fast. My P4 machine has Sata I drive and it's not fast but HDTune shows bizarre things in W7. I tried turning the write caching on, off, OS caching size large on,off. Sometimes it shows like 4.7% cpu usage, then on another run it will show 52.7% cpu usage. I reboot inbetween so it's not that the test data is cached. Shows DMA as UDMA 5 enabled. Maybe the benmarks are broken or something.

 

[darkassain]

Hmmm.... I just re-ran it and this time my processor got a 3.7! I think they might just have a random number generator creating these scores. :sarc:

were you running anything proccesor intensive or Av or malware scanners?

 

[MilesAhead]

Hmmm.... I just re-ran it and this time my processor got a 3.7! I think they might just have a random number generator creating these scores. :sarc:

Yeah, I found a page on the web where the guy claimed he got a much higher index for the HD by turning write caching off! Seems bizarre to me.
He was using the WEI as the benchmark!!

:shock:

 

[DocBrown]

I just installed Win7 on an Intel pent III 600mhz w 512mb ram . It works but real slow like a win98 on a 233mhz computer. I can access the internet & my other networked computers okay.

 

[fireman604]

Dell Inspiron 8000

Surprise I just installed Win 7 on the old Dell Inspiron 8000 1 Gig processor, 512 memory and 30 gig hard drive, It will not run all the fancy stuff but it is not that bad. Office 2003 installed fine, and works Access to the internet is through a wireless card on board network driver is not working. No driver I did get the sound to work and am working on the 32 meg video driver. It is as fast as xp it seems to work fine internet is ok and I was able to move all files from windows old to win 7 documents and then delete the old windows. Score was a 1 because of the video driver or lack of but Microsoft may really annoy computer manufactures with 7 it does not need a big new machine to run. Not bad for a beta

 

[altimax98]

Thats my 3yo laptop. I dunno know why my HD gets such a bad rating. O well, but I run everything maxed out in the settings and no hickups on x64. It runs faster then x86 XP Pro.

 

[Rusty100]

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).

 

[kensiko]

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.

 

[Simba7]

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 ([email protected], 1GB RAM, 40GB HDD, 16MB Radeon). No problems here and it runs really good.

 

[Bumpus]

x40 laptop

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.)

 

[Rusty100]

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 ([email protected], 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)?

 

[nate42nd]

Here's mine on a P4 machine with 512MB of RAM. It runs fine. I am trying 32 bit on it right now. It seems to run better with 32 bit for some reason.

View attachment 10317

 

[kensiko]

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]

How can you "force" Aero???

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

 

[Wilson]

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.

 

[kensiko]

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.