After tuning it up and getting it going nicely earlier today, I got the urge to put Windows 7 RC on it, to see how it can run it. The Good News is: it runs it just fine, Thank You. I did a clean install which wiped out the old XP Pro, and I'm still adding back some of the many programs that got lost in the process, but this old single-core Intel CPU is doing quite a nice job with Windows 7.
I just installed the Java, and tried a Speed Test to Speakeasy in Seattle, and this old machine is downloading at 2810 k-bits a second (351.3 K-bytes) and uploading at 585 K-bits (or 73.1 K-bytes) a second. That's not too bad for a machine that's somewhere between 6 and 8 years old, and was already 2 or 3 years old when I got it in 2005.
So in case anyone's interested, you actually can run Windows 7 on an older PC - assuming that it has had a couple of improvements along the way, like a modern graphics card with its own memory, and a recent-vintage hard-drive with lots of spare room on it. It's not all quad this and duo that, when we get right down to it. This 2-gig CPU still gets it done with the latest Windows. And I'm just as surprised as anyone by that. So it's "Goodbye, XP, Hello Windows 7."
No comments:
Post a Comment