[gamefreak94]

Fine, I'll go toss in my 16 MB Vanta .

gamefreak, tried win7 on that hardware? Results could be interesting.

Spoiler

Its possible to bypass the minimum 512 RAM check at installation with a hex edit

I think the results will be full of lulz since the drivers are from August 2001 and the DirectX Compliance criteria usually has "n/a" written in front of it :lol: Heck, even XP with maximum eye-candy butchers the 8MB card (yeah I checked and it has 8MB VRAM, not 4MB ).

@n_w: Toss it in if you have the time (or if you can be bothered to). I'm interested in seeing the results, with the classic theme, who knows it may just work!

 

[Hard core Rikki]

For giggles, it seems someone installed windows7 on a pentium II 266mhz and 64mb RAM, booting takes 25 minutes.

Kinda extreme difference between XP and win7 certainly, despite the amount of optimizations and additions since vista.

 

[Cid Highwind]

I think the results will be full of lulz since the drivers are from August 2001 and the DirectX Compliance criteria usually has "n/a" written in front of it :lol: Heck, even XP with maximum eye-candy butchers the 8MB card (yeah I checked and it has 8MB VRAM, not 4MB ).

@n_w: Toss it in if you have the time (or if you can be bothered to). I'm interested in seeing the results, with the classic theme, who knows it may just work!

Hehe, reminds me of my TNT2 32MB in the Core 2 Duo system. I really had to turn off a lot of visual features so that it would run Windows Xp smoothly in 1920*1200.

For giggles, it seems someone installed windows7 on a pentium II 266mhz and 64mb RAM, booting takes 25 minutes.

Kinda extreme difference between XP and win7 certainly, despite the amount of optimizations and additions since vista.

I wonder how much can helped by having 256MB of RAM though. RAM bottlenecks can be worse than lack of CPU power.

 

[gamefreak94]

RAM bottle-neck is what's preventing XP from running smoothly on my legacy rig I reckon. CPU usage hovers around 40-50% during a light browsing session + something downloading in the background, but RAM usage is almost always over 90% under such conditions.

 

[Cid Highwind]

Well, it's not that hard to figure out because usually you'll hear an enormous activity coming from your harddrive when this occurs.

 

[n_w95482]

I put in the Vanta, and Windows installed the generic VGA adapter driver. It capped out at 1024x768 (said it had 4 MB VRAM but it has 16...), and as long as you didn't drag windows around, it ran good. It seemed to run faster than when the Radeon was running Aero at 1680x1050.

I shut off a few services and it's cut down on the memory usage a lot. It's idling at 262 MB used right now.

 

[Cid Highwind]

That's really sweet, I was wondering how I could efficiently cut down on RAM usage while not having to cut down on function. Seeing how I'm already at 600-700 MB after booting.

Provided, I'm not starving for RAM, since I have a 2GB system, but especially since I do want to install some anti virus and all, less is better.

 

[n_w95482]

I haven't tried shutting off the same services on my i7, but it used about 1 GB out of the box. The P3 was in the upper 300s right after installing. I think my Athlon 64 X2 system at work uses roughly the same amount as yours (it also has 2 GB). It seems to scale to the amount installed. I'm not sure if it's just Superfetch or what.

 

[-StrikE-]

I am not lacking anything by sticking with XP.

Considering i had a config similar to yours i can say your missing 2 things speed and performance .

Nissan GTR

This is the second time you mention that car in this thread you sir have my respect for good tastes in cars :thumb:

Edit: It seems i remained slightly behind in time with the thread got to catch up :lol:

 

[SCHUMI_4EVER]

Ughm, no? I've never had Windows XP include the extension when I go to rename it, unless the extension was already shown (which should only happen if either it's an unknown extension, or you have it set to always show it). Maybe I'm misinterpreting what you're saying, because not even Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, etc. did that.

I think he's referring to when you set Windows to always show extensions. Vista/7 do what he described.

Correct, I always run my OS with show all extensions.

 

[-StrikE-]

Correct, I always run my OS with show all extensions.

Its the only way to roll i can't imagine myself without that .

 

[fivefeet8]

While I disagree with the OP as I've done numerous times before, I do have a bit of experience using all 3 OSes. I've used Vista and 7 in various RTM states, I must admit I enjoy using 7 far more than either older OSes.

MS has actually made some decent changes from Vista in terms of UI, Networking, compatibility, performance, and Multimedia that is quantifiable in some respects. I'm running 7 64bit and it installed in about 20 minutes(full desktop) with all drivers installed. My system configuration is still arguably high end, but not the newest by any means. I also have a wireless network card that would not install at all in Vista 64bit, but does so fine in 7(drivers pre-installed). My PSX2USB adapter which I use primarily for emulation did not work at all in Vista x64bit, but works perfectly fine in 7(drivers pre-installed). I've used 7 RTM when it was released to MSDN and I can say that my experience with new hardware additions and issues have been surprisingly positive.

A comparison to XP for me is moot since I've become so accustomed to the new UI and other features on 7 and to some extent on Vista that I find XP cumbersome for my purposes. And I still use XP at my employment everyday.

On that note, I also think that if you're fine with what you have, then that is a perfectly legitimate opinion. It always confounds me when people take it personally when something is said in a negative about the Sofware/Hardware they're using. Get over it and move on, life is too short.

 

[Spyhop]

LOL @ a Digger's comment

"XP feels like the old dog you don't like being around because it pisses on carpets, can barely walk and smells bad."

 

[cyric1983]

Matt Damon...

 

[Princess Garnet]

I tried it on my older PC. Scores were about in line with what I expected. I can't speak for experience yet, since I haven't tried much, but it was slightly sluggish (not overtly so) just navigating and doing some basic things. To recap, it's a Pentium III 933MHz, 512MB of PC133 SDRAM, a GeForce 4 MX440 64MB AGP8x (AGP4x motherboard though), and a 40GB 7200RPM 2MB cache IDE drive.

The CPU got a 1.4 (would be interested to see if the Williamette Pentium 4s got much better since they weren't really much better, and what did the Tualatin get?).
The RAM got a 1.7 (surprisingly).
The GPU got a 1.9 for Windows.
The GPU got a 1.0 for gaming.
The hard drive got a 5.4, which was quite higher than I expected (expected 3.x to 4.x).

I'm sure if it had a DirectX 9 GPU in it, it'd get the 1.4 as it's base score from the CPU. I'm just wondering why the CPU and the RAM have different scores, since they're both 133MHz, and the RAM is way low at 512MB (in my experience on my main PC, RAM speed and amount are what it measures, and whenever I raised my CPU speed, the RAM score went up with it to match, so I was expecting to see them both ~1.x matched).

The test completed fine, obviously. I didn't run it. I had just installed, and went off to grab some food, and got back and it had done it itself. Maybe I'll try some games on it soon enough.

I'm also a bit surprised the properties menu identifies the CPU by it's string name (Family 6, model 8, stepping 6), rather than just Intel Pentium III or something. I know these are old CPUs, but still.

From what little I've seen, Windows 7 likely won't replace Windows XP on any Pentium IIIs or 512MB PCs (if they're primary PCs), but even for Pentium 4/Athlon XPs, or 1GB machines, I'd say it'd be a good idea. I know it runs well (very, very well, better than XP did on it even) on my brother's PC I gave him, which is a Pentium 4 2.8GHz, 2GB RAM, and GeForce 6800 GS AGP.

I shut off a few services and it's cut down on the memory usage a lot. It's idling at 262 MB used right now.

Besides the obvious search indexing, what did you turn off? I wouldn't mind trying to see what effect this has myself.