Windows 7…The Old Hardware Test

I met Jonathan Cusson in Montreal a couple of months ago while I was there with the IT Manager “AlignIT” tour. We got to talking about virtualization and he offered to write a couple of posts on things he’s doing at Alpha Mosaik and in his spare time. Not long after getting his hands on Windows 7 he had it up and running on multiple hardware and virtualization platforms to see what the install experience was like as well as general usability. I get asked “the hardware question” all the time – what is it like on older platforms?

In steps Jonathan with the answer - after a couple of weeks of installing it, he sent along this post with his initial gut feel of having it up and running.

You can still get the bits to install and try it out yourselves – Rod posted about that on Sunday the 25th.

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Windows 7 beta is available and I could not wait to test it. I already have 3 installations of Windows 7 for intensive testing. I have decided to put Windows 7 trough a really good test.

When Vista came out people complained that it took too much resources and that you needed a powerful computer to run it. Well, I just tested Windows 7 with a 6 years old computer and believe me the performance are surprisingly good even on old PCs. Here is the hardware setup of that machine:

 Windows 7-06

As you can see the system global score is 3.0 but keep in mind this is a 6 years old computer with slower CPU, memory and video card. What is also amazing is that all the hardware was detected and Windows Update to care of installing latest drivers. I have installed Office 2007, Norton 360 version 3(beta), Photoshop CS and Nero 9. Well the performance are good enough to work on it. I am used to very good performance on my main computer (Dual Core T9300, 4GB RAM & Quadro FX 1600 512MB) and I can say that Windows 7 performs well even with older configurations. I even went to a slower configuration with a Pentium 4 2Ghz, 1GB of RAM and a very old ATI R92LE 32MB video card. (don’t ask me how I got this card, I can’t remember) With that, the system got slower but would still be enough to use for Internet navigation, Word and Excel.

The most amazing is that so far I did not get any errors or crashes and this is the first beta version! All of those waiting for a new Windows that offers stability, compatibility and performances are served!

This post was written with Live Writer on Windows 7.

 

Jonathan Cusson
IT Consultant, MCP
Member of TechNet, IT Pro Momentum and Experts Exchange
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