Windows 7 was let out of it’s cage on October 22nd so I thought that today might be a good time to answer the age old question:

Will Microsoft’s new OS run on old hardware? I mean really old hardware? Well, depending on just how old the hardware is the answer is yes it does. Rather well in fact.

Now I’m not going to talk about whether it’s worth the price of Windows 7 or whether it’s worth backing up all your stuff and “upgrading” from XP to Windows 7, there’s plenty of articles out there that have already beaten this subject to death and back again. All I’m going to do is give you my personal experience of running the Windows 7 Release Candidate (Build 7100) on my 7 year old HP a645c desktop PC.

As it stands:

Note: This is about as minimum spec as you’d want to go and still have a peppy system.

Manufacturer:                  HP Pavilion 061

Model:                               PC111A-ABA a645c

System memory:               1.00 GB RAM (DDR2)

System type:                      32-bit operating system

Processor cores:                 1 (AMD 3200+)

64-bit capable:                   No

Display adapter type:         NVIDIA GeForce 6200 (AGP)

Dedicated video memory: 256 MB

Optical drives:                    2 (1 Lite On DVD ROM, 1 Lite On DVD burner)

Display:                               19” wide screen

Original OS:                       Windows XP Pro SP3

New OS:                              Windows 7 Ultimate RC

That’s enough info to give you a good idea that this rig of mine is about as powerful as one of today’s higher end net books with a bit more graphics power (but not much since the old GeForce 6200 was never known to be anything but mediocre at best).

It is enough to run the Aero interface though.

So why did I attempt this feat on this old fossil of mine? Because I wanted to personally see if all the hoopla about the Windows 7 (beta/RC builds) was actually true or not. In short…yes it was.

To be realistic about it, this old XP machine could not have even come close to running Windows Vista. However, it flew right along on XP Pro SP3. It flew even faster when booted up with Ubuntu 9.04. But how would it take running Windows 7?

In short, this old beater of mine took to Windows 7 like it took to Windows XP and with almost zero problems. In fact the only problem I encountered after booting into the new OS was a single unknown device which turned out to be the on-board modem. This still wasn’t a problem since all I did was tell Windows 7 to go find a driver for it and after less than 30 seconds the Device Manager was completely happy.

I did a bit of UI tweaking much the same as when XP Pro SP3 was loaded on the machine with the single Windows 7 unique exception of turning Aero transparency off (I left Aero Peek on though). This wasn’t because I was looking for better performance as Aero ran fine for all intents and purposes—I just don’t like the effect. Personally I find windows transparency distracting but that’s just me.

This is how I set Windows 7 visual settings. Season to taste as it were:

(There’s 2 more settings at the top that you can’t see. Also unchecked)

Now, real quick like, I’d like to debunk a Windows 7 feature. The so-called “Windows Experience Index”. This feature “rates” your computer on 5 different areas:

• Processor
• Memory (RAM)
• Graphics
• Gaming graphics
• Primary  hard disk (hard drive)

The scoring goes from 1.0 to 7.9. Not too sure how they assigned 7.9 as the top end of the Experience Index but who am I to question these kind of things?

Now you might think that the overall rating would be an average of all 5 scores but it’s not. It’s actually the lowest score out of the 5 that’s suppose to be the final overall rating of the whatever hardware it’s running on and/or how satisfying your use experience will be.

That’s  funny, I didn’t know Microsoft knew exactly what kind of user I was as to be able to determine how satisfied I’d be?

Anyway, here’s the “Windows Experience Index” for my old war horse of a PC:

OMG, 2.5?!?! This machine must really crawl!

Crawl? Hardly, to say the least of it. It actually flies right along to be truthful about it. Sure, it’s not a gaming machine but it wasn’t one when it was new either. The HP a645c was an all around decent, general purpose desktop computer that was easily upgradable (to a point) when it first came out. Nothing more.

Now let’s look at something else that shows a more realistic picture of how Windows 7 sits on this ancient piece of hardware:

Everyone recognizes the good ol’ Task Manager, right? The one above shows the resource usage after a full day of beating on Windows 7. One thing though. Anyone who immediately points out the fact there’s only 64 MB of (Free) memory left needs to fall back and try again.

Forget Free. Free memory is nothing but a bit of extra gravy. What you need to pay attention to is available memory which is 609 MB plus that little bit of 64 MB gravy on top. Windows 7 has cached 580 MB of itself in memory (just as it should) with the other 609 MB mapped out and ready to go. In the end the whole thing boils down to one quick responding OS—even on this old hardware.

This is where Windows 7 really shines in that it actually gives back the resources that are no longer in use. I had window after window open (programs, explorer, browsers, graphic programs, etc), way beyond what I would normally use, until I showed 91% of memory in use and the OS was still nice and responsive. Then I closed all these extra windows and all of those resources were given back to the system. Yes, it did take a few minutes before the OS realized that I was through being ridiculous but after that the Task Manager showed what you see above.

I certainly couldn’t say that about XP.

Just to note; I have three programs that are constantly running and that’s my email client (Thunderbird 3.0 nightly builds), Diskeeper 2009 (w/ auto-defrag enabled) and my anti-virus suite (Avast! 4.8) which make up 7 of the 44 processes listed at the bottom left of the Task Manager image.

So there you go. Windows 7 running just fine and dandy on a 7 year old PC. In fact in many ways it runs better than XP ever did.

Of course not everyone who tries to put Windows 7 on old hardware are going to have an easy of a time as I did. My old machine is an “off-the-shelf” PC with standard pieces/parts stuffed into it with an extra 512 MB and a well known video card with it’s own dedicated memory added by yours truly. No OS developer will ever guarantee that you won’t have to go out and find an updated driver or three for stubborn/old/one-off peripherals or piece of internal hardware when a new OS is released. It’s just part and parcel of upgrading.

Again, I’m not saying that it’s worth going out and paying out $$$ to upgrade an old system to Windows 7, that’s not the point of this post. All I’m saying here is that it can be done and, in this case, very easily done with great results.

Anyone else out there running Windows 7 on old hardware?