Did You Say Pentium 4? Really?
Having managed to get Windows 7 running smoothly on the HP Mini 2140, we decided to take it a step further and try to get it installed on a much older system. With the low minimum specs requirement for Windows 7, we weren't expecting any problems installing and getting Windows 7 to run - or at least that's what we thought.
Turns out we were wrong.
Well, just wrong on the installation process, but more on that later. Let's start with the basics first: the system requirements. Like Windows Vista, Windows 7 boasts of very modest requirements: 1GHz processor and 1GB RAM. A DirectX 9 capable graphics card for Aero is recommended but if you don't fancy Aero, any graphics card would do the job. The real kicker is unlike Vista, Windows 7 will run smoothly on just 1GB RAM while Vista tends to struggle even with 2GB RAM. Microsoft has certainly kept their word when they meant they really streamlined the OS and its resource allocation needs. And so we set out try our first installation attempt on this long unused system:-
Our first rig featuring an Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz (Northwood), Intel 845 motherboard, 1GB DDR RAM, a 7200RPM 40GB HDD and Riva TNT2 graphics. We kid you not.
Our installation problem here lies with the older hardware - getting it to boot from the USB drive was almost impossible and since the previous installation of Windows XP on this aged system was corrupt, we couldn't quite boot into XP to install. Long story short, we reinstalled Windows XP, before installing Windows 7 the . So how was Windows 7 on our Pentium 4 2.4GHz machine with 1GB memory? Well, in a word: great! The OS was smooth as silk though it was lacking the prettier Aero interface due to our Riva TNT2 card (which some of you may fondly remember). All in all, Windows 7 worked like a breeze on this machine though it did take twice as long to boot (30 seconds for Windows XP compared to 59 seconds for Windows 7).
So sure it works fine on a decent early Pentium 4 machine you say, but what about if we go right down to the base minimum requirements? Take the jump to the next page to find out!
On an Athlon
Digging around in our vast storeroom, we managed to find an old AMD Athlon machine that was just right at the border of the minimum requirements at 1.2GHz. Installation too was done similar to the P4 machine and took longer than expected due to the slow read/write speeds of the machine's ancient hard disk drive. We persevered though and soon after perhaps two hours or so, we had Windows 7 up and running too on the Athlon rig.
Barely hitting the minimum requirements of Windows 7 is this AMD Athlon 1.2GHz rig that uses an MSI VIA KT266 platform with 1GB DDR RAM, 4500RPM 20GB HDD and uses an ASUS TNT2 graphcis card.
Sadly, our experience was hampered by the bottleneck of the hard disk drive. It could have been better but with a sluggish 20GB HDD that's running at just 4500 RPM, we were so out of luck. Also, stuff tended to slow down a tad at times as the CPU was stressed to full load during the simplest of tasks. But let's be fair here. If you're just using it for basic productivity needs and for Internet needs, you can do no wrong here as it's definitely more than sufficient. The fact that you could get Windows 7 running on an aging machine without any of the sluggishness that we've come to expect from Vista is something that we can jump straight into bed with.
Due to the limited hard drive capacity however, we were unable to set up a dual boot configuration to get the boot times for Windows XP and Windows 7. Windows 7 did take around 65 seconds, pretty close to the faster P4 machine that we tested earlier. Bear in mind however, that we didn't experience any sluggishness when using the other machine for basic tasks while we could actually detect some on the Athlon.
To see how far we could stretch the Athlon system though, we decided to underclock the processor and also remove half of the RAM, leaving the unit with a 931MHz CPU and 512MB RAM. On the whole, the unit performed pretty much the same as before, though the lack of RAM does make its presence felt when you open too many applications. We don't really advise anyone going on this route though. Sure it's possible but it's not really a good idea unless you just want a computer for the most rudimentary usage (like surfing the web).
Well wrapping things up, how low can you go with Windows 7? Pretty low it seems, but the lower you go, the more limited you will be by what you can do. We do think it's cool on how you can still smoothly run Windows 7 on some of the lower spec'd machines compared to Vista but of course, don't expect to bring that old 486 DX2-66 back to life. However, it certainly does give your older and probably decommissioned systems lying around in the storeroom a new lease of life by setting up a new home network to allow you to fulfill that long lost wish of surfing the Internet in the toilet and more (amongst other cravings).
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