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Running Windows Vista and 7 on a Shite PC

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Mag-X:
I have a bunch of old memory of varying capacities, and I was bored today, so I figured I see just how low I could go with Vista and 7. There's no real point to this post.

TL;DR version: Windows 7 runs on a really really shitty computer.

The beast:
An HP Vectra VL400.
Pentium III @ 996MHz
up to 512MB PC133 (limited by BIOS)
GeForce FX5200 128MB

First I installed (the much hated and buggy) Windows Vista Beta 2. At the time this was released, I had it installed as my only OS for months and never had a problem with it. I was even using the 64-bit version.

This is it running on 512MB with Aero turned on. Despite the Vista index rating of 1, it ran just fine. Notice that it doesn't base the score on the lowest sub-score, but just sort of makes it up.


Here is what Vista was going to look like with Aero turned off before they made the fake glass skin. I really liked this skin, but I guess they thought it looked too Mac-ish or something. I saved the themes directory for this old version. I can upload it if anyone wants to try getting it to work with the final version of Vista.


Who says Vista is a memory hog? Here is Beta 2 running on 256MB and doing just fine. You can see here that Beta 2 still had the old XP style task manager that showed page file instead of RAM usage.


After this I tried running it on 128MB and booted up to a BSOD.

---

Next I installed Vista Release Candidate 1. Unlike the weird graphical installer of B2, this one is exactly like the one in Windows 7.

Here it is again, running just fine on 512MB of RAM with Aero and then without. The score has gone up from 1 in the beta to a 1.7



Here is it barely crawling along with 256MB of RAM. It was definitely slower than the beta, but still usable if you had to.


Trying it with 128MB resulted in booting to another BSOD.

---

Finally I tried it with Windows 7 Ultimate RTM.

Here it is running on 512MB with Aero. I had to manually install the drivers for the video card before Aero would work. The Vista installs worked right out of the box. Ignore the incorrect date. I had to set the BIOS back to install the Vista betas.


...on 256 and still working just fine.




Trying to boot it on 128MB resulted in the same BSOD as Vista.

I didn't think to try it with the Vista installs, unfortunately, but I put in a 64MB stick to make 192, and...

It works!

bloody000:
I installed Arch onto a 9.99 USB drive and use it everyday for no obvious reasons. That's more pointless than yours!  :P

Rebs:
Those are some "Fun Facts". I can only wonder how old some of those parts are after you said you had a "64MB RAM Stick"  :o
And it actually is in working order  :o

Arveene:
It's quite amazing that Microsoft has made an OS that has LOWER minimum system requirements than the previous. I actually remember reading an article in CPU magazine a couple months back (Edit: Actually September's XD) talking about this same exact topic.

Lupin:
This is old news.

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