Windows 7 Beats Snow Leopard on Older Hardware Support

If you have an older PC and you want the upcoming Windows 7 but don't want to buy a new computer, Microsoft has your back. The same cannot be said for getting Apple's Snow Leopard OS on older Macs.

By Michael Scalisi
Thu, June 11, 2009

PC World — Got a four-year-old Mac? Forget the newest version of OS X; Apple's Snow Leopard will only be supported on Intel CPUs. Got a PC from 2001? Windows 7 just might run on it. I tested a below-spec PC with the latest version of Windows and saw surprising results.

If you have a PC and you want the upcoming Microsoft OS, but don't want to buy a new computer, Microsoft has your back. The minimum specifications listed on the Windows 7 RC download page are a 1 GHz Processor, 1 GB RAM, and 16GB of free hard disk space.

This means if you have a computer that is more than a few years old, you can still get some functionality from the latest OS rolling out of Redmond. Intel hit the 1 GHz processor mark on March 8, 2000, which means theoretically Windows 7 could run on computers over nine years old! Since Microsoft is known for understating their hardware requirements, I grabbed an old PC out of retirement and put it to test.

The PC I chose had an Intel P3 933 MHz processor, 768 MB of RAM, and an 80GB hard disk. My test subject was manufactured in 2001.

Installation was not all breezy. My first attempt stalled when the installer could not find a driver for my DVD drive. I resolved the situation by borrowing a DVD drive from a newer computer. Once Windows installed, I realized that I was stuck using the "Standard VGA Graphics Adapter" driver since Windows did not recognize my Nvidia GEForce 2 MX 200 graphics card. Desperate to use my 20-inch monitor's native 1600 x 1200 resolution, I installed the XP Nvidia driver since one for Vista is not available (Windows 7 is compatible with Vista drivers).

After a few Blue Screens o' Death, I reverted back to the built in Standard VGA driver. Thankfully, yet oddly, Windows continued to offer a 1600 x 1200 mode. Obviously using Aero was out of the question, which was to be expected. The last issue I had was that Windows 7 didn't recognize my 3COM 3C905TX network adaptor (really, Microsoft?!). Rather than hunt down a driver that might work, I threw in an Intel NIC that happened to be within arm's reach.

With all that behind me, I installed Google Chrome and Office 2007 and prepared to get to work. Frankly, at this point, I was shocked to find my circa-2001 computer running a 2009 operating system. I'm not going to lie and say that the performance was great, but it was, well, surprisingly usable. The time between pressing the power button and having a desktop was a respectable 110 seconds.

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