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I have an "old" athlon XP 3500 +, 1GB ram, ATI X1800. I would not install Vista on it, but do you think Windows 7 would run fine ?

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Are you sure you can't afford memory upgrade? It would be beneficial even with Windows XP. – Bender Sep 26 '09 at 8:33
after a few restarts and with good softwares choices it would run well maybe better than xp ... – zillion Sep 26 '09 at 8:35
To be fair, vista runs alright on 1gb RAM, providing everything else is up to spec. Win7 really isn't much of an improvement, resourcewise (but I'd never reccomend vista over it) – Phoshi Sep 27 '09 at 14:36
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5 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

Some people have run Windows 7 on very old hardware, just to proof it would work, like a Pentium II with 96 Mb of RAM. It's probably not very usable but it works.

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Your computer should be fine running Windows 7. You might have to disable the nicest Aero features though.

You could eventually grab some cheap RAM (if your MB supports more) on eBay, along with a newer graphic card, for little money.

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Quite an example there but it's true that windows 7 handle a wide-array of computers ... – zillion Sep 26 '09 at 8:53
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up vote 1 down vote

download Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor, It'll tell you precisly.

It should be able to take Win7, though.

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up vote 1 down vote

I am typing this using Windows 7 on a Pentium M 1.86 GHz laptop with 1GB of memory and it runs fine. I use the Windows 7 Basic theme (a non-Aero theme) and that seems to help quite a bit.

Right now I have about 460MB of physical memory available - currently running is:

Firefox Dropbox AVG

All the default services are enabled, I did not do any tweaking there.

Even when running many more apps, I find the swapping speed is acceptable (although speed of your hard drive becomes critical here). If you expect to get great speed out of it running Photoshop or Lightroom, that's another story. But I really find little difference between using Windows 7 and XP in terms of speed on this machine.

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up vote 0 down vote

yes it should run pretty well ... if you need a driver try the vista drivers but do all your updates before cause windows 7 now handle most of the drivers by the windows updates ...

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up vote 0 down vote

will it run? yes

fine? well, this is a very stretchable term.

installing a $100+ OS on an old clunker that will get you $30 at a yard sale? debatable :)

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Windows XP is sold the same price vista is, so unless I have a preexisting XP license, installing XP or 7 will be the same price – user4444 Oct 9 '09 at 8:27
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