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how low can windows 7 go? (old computer)

F

Feat

Junior Member
So I installed windows 7 on an old Compaq Presario 5005sr i got from Sears years ago.
Pentium III coppermine 933mhz
512mgs pc133 sdram
Geforce 5200 256mgs pci
X-FI Xtream audio pci
80gb westerdigital hdd
1TB westerdigital external hdd

The computer origianaly had 128mgs of ram, a 60gb hdd, no gfx card and had windows ME.
Windows 7 seems to run kinda slow but it just chugs along with out crashing. More than i can say for winME. 10+ windows open + importing a large library of music an everything worked.
Just real slow. Loaded up World of Warcraft on it, i get about 6fps outside of citys. Windows XP would get about 15fps in the same place. I'll try to get more games to work on it later.
As far as i know, this is below min spec for windows 7. i could be wrong though.

But it still works!

Well at least it dosent use up ALL the ram.
 
Yes the CPU is a bit slow as far as MHz go. As for the CPU achentecture its way slow. But whats really holding you back is the amount of RAM. You need 1GB but i don't think that board can acomidate that much. Chances are it will max out at 512MB of RAM.

Considering the numbers your memory usage is maxed out. There is only 2mb free so that is pretty much maxed out.
 
Welcome to AnandTech Forums.

It would work much better with 1GB RAM or more (if your computer support it).

Yeah it looks like it does not use all the memory because the OS it tuned to balance between the actual RAM and the pagefile (Hard Drive emulating RAM).

So in your case it leaves some RAM available but it is using more the pagefile and thus it works slow.

As an Example with 2GB RAM it would use at idle about 800MB to 1GB RAM.
 
Its not my main computer anyway. I just wanted to see how well it would preform with the windows 7. I mostly just use it to play music. The HP service site shows it as having max 512 mg of ram posible do to bios limits. It also cant take a hdd bigger than 80gig(i dont remember the exact gig posible). Im running win7 on my main computer. It plays everything just fine. Exept Far Cry, the textures get some kind of coruption. It plays crysis on very high tho ...kinda odd.
my main computer:
AMD64 X2 6000
4gigs ddr2
Geforce 260 GTX
X-FI soundcard
Windows 7 64bit
+ a bunch of hdds an such

on a side note. With windows xp when Doom3 came out i managed to sqeeze 15fps out of the poor old compaq.
 
Would using that "Readyboost" thing microsoft was touting about help? i got a few 2gig flash sticks laying around. It only has hardware suport for usb 1. win7 and winXP kept complaing about " This device would work faster if plugged into a USB2 port".
 
You can try.

However your computer has only the slow USB1.1 so it would not help much.
 
Plugged in my Kingston 2gig stick. When i got it the box said "Readyboost" on it.
But win7 says this:
"This device dose not have the required performance characteristics for use in speeding up your system"

Because of the USB1.1 problem?
My main computer thinks the drive is just fine, so thats what im guessing.

update: i tryed a another stick, same thing.

update2: Quake 1 and Quake 3 run just fine.
 
Man talk about stretching your system! What do you plan on doing with it that requires windows 7? That computer is a good match for Windows 2000.

ps: did you patch FarCry to 1.33/1.4 at least?
 
Actually "stretching" the computer is a very good idea.

But Not for Action Gaming (which is a waste of time to begin with 😉 ).

Many users can use an old P-III PC for 90% of their computer activities and would Not know the difference.

However it is as "Chic" as using a pair of Nike from 3 years ago.
 
So I managed to network the computers together. All the networking stuff works. Way better than winXP. But i ran into a problem...or few problems with win7 on the old computer:

mfpmp.exe seems to want to use 10 - 90% of my cpu when running videos.
Even though the content im playing isnt copy protected it has something to do with DWM.
Using Winamp fixes the mfpmp.exe prob but winamp likes to use 50-90% of the cpu too.
Also wmpnetwk.exe likes to use up 100% of the cpu. I disabled it so everythings normal now.
None of this stuff has any effect on my good computer, probly do to being so much faster.


 
P3 systems used to be good for common tasks but then the web got infected with that Flash Animation virus that spread everywhere.

As for upgrading memory, often HP doesn't get it right what the max limits are. Maybe they did but you might try more memory if you have it lying around. There is a good chance that it may take more than 512MB memory if it has more than 2 slots and isn't Intel 815 chipset.

You can run a larger hard drive using any PCI RAID or non-RAID IDE card that has it's own bios PROM and is rated for ATA133 or higher (sometimes ATA100 too, after a bios update for the card), or SATA150 and 300 cards.
 
This is what CPUZ says:

Processors Information
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Processor 1 (ID = 0)
Number of cores 1 (max 1)
Number of threads 1 (max 1)
Name Intel Pentium III EB
Codename Coppermine
Specification
Package Socket 370 FC-PGA (platform ID = 4h)
CPUID 6.8.6
Extended CPUID 6.8
Brand ID 2
Core Stepping cC0
Technology 0.18 um
Core Speed 930.4 MHz (7.0 x 132.9 MHz)
Stock frequency 933 MHz
Instructions sets MMX, SSE
L1 Data cache 16 KBytes, 4-way set associative, 32-byte line size
L1 Instruction cache 16 KBytes, 4-way set associative, 32-byte line size
L2 cache 256 KBytes, 8-way set associative, 32-byte line size
FID/VID Control no
Features

Chipset
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Northbridge Intel i810E rev. A3
Southbridge Intel 82801AA (ICH) rev. 02
Memory Type SDRAM
Memory Size 512 MBytes
CAS# 2.0
RAS# to CAS# 2
RAS# Precharge 2
Cycle Time (tRAS) 5
Bank Cycle Time (tRC) 7

The bios dose not seem to have any advanced settings i could look at for overclocking.
I think I'll try buying another 512mg of ram. If the computer wont take it i could just put it in one of the other old computers i have laying around.(old windows 98 IBM aptiva)

The whole point of posting this in the first place is that I hear so many people saying that it runs slow. Its only about half as fast as when running winxp. Any computer made in the last few years should be fine running win7. This computer has had Windows 98/winME/winXP/Longhorn/VistaBeta/Ubuntu/win7. and so far winXP runs fastest followed by win7. All i use it for is internet and music anyways. So win7 runs that just fine. My X-FI sound card sounds good too. Little bit if a pain finding drivers though. I have a westerndigital 1TB usb drive for backups, so the drive size realy dosent matter.
 
So far with only 512m of ram it still can run these games.
doom, doom2, quake, quake3, bloodrayne, ... here is the shocker tho ...It runs DOOM3!
Not playable but ..it still dose run it. low settings with highQ shaders - shadows- bumpmapping - specular, all on 640x480. Not bad realy for what it is.With the Defalt timedemo Windows XP could only get 15 fps in doom3 on this system. Win7 gets 11.5 average fps.
 
Originally posted by: Feat

The computer origianaly had 128mgs of ram, a 60gb hdd, no gfx card and had windows ME.
Windows 7 seems to run kinda slow but it just chugs along with out crashing. More than i can say for winME. [/L]
Click to expand...

I don't know about this comment. I'm sure Win ME would run better on this computer than Windows 7. Win ME was made to run on lesser hardware than this.
 
I should try to get it running on this old poweredge 2300 from 1998 I inherited. PIII, slot 1, 6 drive hot swap backplane!
 
Originally posted by: Feat
So I installed windows 7 on an old Compaq Presario 5005sr i got from Sears years ago.
Pentium III coppermine 933mhz
512mgs pc133 sdram
Geforce 5200 256mgs pci
X-FI Xtream audio pci
80gb westerdigital hdd
1TB westerdigital external hdd

The computer origianaly had 128mgs of ram, a 60gb hdd, no gfx card and had windows ME.
Windows 7 seems to run kinda slow but it just chugs along with out crashing. More than i can say for winME. 10+ windows open + importing a large library of music an everything worked.
Just real slow. Loaded up World of Warcraft on it, i get about 6fps outside of citys. Windows XP would get about 15fps in the same place. I'll try to get more games to work on it later.
As far as i know, this is below min spec for windows 7. i could be wrong though.

But it still works!

Well at least it dosent use up ALL the ram.
Click to expand...

Pity you can't boost the ram to 1gb. Then overclock the cpu to 1Ghz. Win 7 would probably run ok on that.

Without that I'd run Windows XP or Windows 2000.
 
Originally posted by: mpilchfamily
Yes the CPU is a bit slow as far as MHz go. As for the CPU achentecture its way slow. But whats really holding you back is the amount of RAM. You need 1GB but i don't think that board can acomidate that much. Chances are it will max out at 512MB of RAM.

Considering the numbers your memory usage is maxed out. There is only 2mb free so that is pretty much maxed out.
Click to expand...

english lessons (or spellchecker), stat!
 
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