Windows 7 on a old pc

theheyes said:
The official minimum is 1GB for x86 Windows 7 - that spec should be fine.
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Official minimum != best practice.

Imagine playing a game with the bare minimum hardware requirements, it's dire.

Yes, it will install and run on 1GB, but it's not exactly the lightest of memory footprints for an OS, doing more than one thing at once and it will chug, because it will be constantly swapping. Old RAM is cheap, get another stick of DDR.

Guest2 said:
I install 64bit mode. Im sure it would be ok with 512mb actually. Seemed to run fine with 1gb
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It really doesn't run "fine" with 1GB, and it certainly wouldn't be "ok" with 512MB.
 
If the OP was going to attempt to play modern games on that PC then no, 1GB would not be enough. But it will run with 1GB and is fine for browsing and word processing. The official minimum reflects what I have found in my experience.
 
silworth said:
It really doesn't run "fine" with 1GB, and it certainly wouldn't be "ok" with 512MB.
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Did for me on a fresh install with 1GB, Velociraptor drive and dual core intel CPU. I'm sure it would install fine with 512mb. There was a fair amount of hard drive activity but thats not the point. It worked and was fast enough.

Gaming would be another matter
 
theheyes said:
If the OP was going to attempt to play modern games on that PC then no, 1GB would not be enough. But it will run with 1GB and is fine for browsing and word processing. The official minimum reflects what I have found in my experience.
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It's just not possible, my current opera window is using over THREE HUNDRED MB of RAM, add the system overheads, and even then you are left with very little before you will only have swap space left.

Guest2 said:
Did for me on a fresh install with 1GB, Velociraptor drive and dual core intel CPU. I'm sure it would install fine with 512mb. There was a fair amount of hard drive activity but thats not the point. It worked and was fast enough.

Gaming would be another matter
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What a great comparison that is, a very quick single drive and a CPU with over 4 times the processing power. It won't run smoothly with 1GB, as you said yourself there was a lot of disk activity, disk activity = swapping, swapping = slow.
 
It clearly is possible because I've done it... no doubt many others have too. And I don't mean just install, I mean install and use. It works.
 
I've used Win7 on virtual machines with less juice than that. I've also installed it on old single core Athlon CPUs with 512MB to 1GB of RAM. Not what I'd want in a PC, but for the "web/email/facebook" type folks requesting it, they're more than happy.
 
silworth said:
What a great comparison that is, a very quick single drive and a CPU with over 4 times the processing power. It won't run smoothly with 1GB, as you said yourself there was a lot of disk activity, disk activity = swapping, swapping = slow.
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He didnt state the hard drive in use. swapping = not that slow on my machine.

With I had a 512mb stick to see how Windows 7 handles
 
i got windows 7 running on a laptop with 1gb ram and 1.2 dual core

for what i use it for its perfect!
 
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i put win 7 on a friends lousy pc, with intergrated graphics, and 512 ram
it ran better than xp, would not do aero,
it was ok for him internet etc,
i doubt good enough for anyone on here lol
ps with some ancient amd cpu

put it this way the pc, had a 40gb hardrive:eek:
 
I installed it on a Pentium M 1.73ghz system with 1GB of RAM and an ancient 40gb hard disk and it wasn't brilliant, but certainly acceptable for internet browsing and basic usage. Even had Left4Dead running on there, but the 6800LE wasn't really up to it!
 
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