Windows 10: Let's run Win10 on really really old hardware

I bought the motherboard in 2006, it's a P6N Sli Platinum mobo. It's 9 years old.

Just changed to quad core this year. The old E6600 still did run okayish for office work and many normal tasks. You get a long way with a SSD and lots of memory these days (4 Gb may not be a lot now but it was then), but of course if you have 25 tabs open in chrome, use handbrake to encode video, use photoshop to edit images and have plex indexing movies at the same time, yes you run into trouble *Smile

 

I HAVE been running into trouble with the ambient heat (no AC) these past few weeks. lots of screen corruption in the vertical elements of programs and pictures. The processor is fast, I have 5 GB of RAM and a small SSD, BUT the graphics on this system leave something to be desired; only a 3.2 score in Windows 7's WEI. It just doesn't cool down readily enough for me to be comfortable.

I'm still thinking of going back to Windows 7 on it. Just too many processes (Cortana, Universal app support, etc.) that you can't turn off in W10. I'll still have W10 on my fast laptop that stays at home, but not on this small away laptop for work.

 

On my 8 year PC Win10 is running really smooth.

Upgrading from build to build it's a pain because it takes a hour but i don't know why, the CPU doesn't seems to use the full processing power and the HDD is old but it's a 7200rpm drive which gets around 70MB/s - 80MB/s in synthetic tests.

 

When you upgrade, windows has to save all of your files, programs and settings and than to put everything back in order. When doing clean install it goes much faster because it doesn't have to do all that extra work.

 

Jack07
- thanks for being the first AMD contributor to this thread. I'd like to ask you if you have tried to install a 64-bit version of Windows 10 to your PC, or did it fail to work because of hardware limitations?

 

Didn't try because the 64bits version needs more Ram, more ram for windows, less ram for my Firefox. *Biggrin
I also have a tv-tunner and i didn't found a win7 x64 driver for that, so I didn't bother installing Win10 x64

 

Specs:

• Intel Celeron E3200 @ 2.4 GHz - 1MB Cache
• 2GB DDR2 @ 800MHz
• Intel G31 Express Chipset
• Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6V160E0 - 8MB Cache - Sata II - 7200 rpm
• Windows 10 Pro 64bit 10162

Runs surprisingly nicely; not noticeably worse than Win 7 -- feels a bit more snappier and responsive. I set a fixed size swapfile on the non-system drive and have not experienced any thrashing/lock-ups due to the low memory.

Only issue compared to Win 7 is the CPU usage is higher when playing video in Firefox, this causes a heat increase and the fan to kick in to an audible level, which is midly irritating. I have all the fan and CPU settings set to lower CPU usage and favour quiet fan.









[youtube]nF8gdfCf-4U[/youtube]

 

Hi everyone,
Just thought this might be interesting to some people: I am typing this from Windows 10, the final release, from an old Opteron system that was working on 8.0 (but failed the 8.1 update test). I did an inplace upgrade to Win10 32 bit and all is working well so far.
PS. I have not tried a clean install yet.
PS. I have 8gb of ram but pulled 4gb out since 64 bit is not an option. I know it is not ideal, but it is fast enough on 32bit since memory management is so much better than on Win7. So I'd much rather run Win10 32 than Win7 64 since that was unstable with NVIDIA graphics.

I have an old AGP card, Nvidia 6200, I downloaded the latest Nvidia drivers (390 I believe) and those worked.

My specs:
Tyan Tiger K8W
dual 250 Opteron
Nvidia 6200 AGP
Raptor 36gb WD

For the record, the system feels faster than a recent quad core build with 4gb of ram and a samsung Evo 850 120Gb SSD! So there is life in these opties yet
I think I built this originally in 2005ish!

 

I got 10 working without having to install any drivers on my Dell Inspiron Mini 10v.

Dell Inspiron Mini 10v
Intel Atom N270
1GB RAM
Intel 945 Mobile Graphics
160GB 5400RPM SATA drive

Touchpad is a little wonky compared to its previous OS, XP, as I can't do two-finger scrolling or side-scrolling. Otherwise, it runs pretty well! Around 700MB of RAM is used idling and about 5% CPU. With Edge open to the new tab page, RAM is about 785MB in use and CPU hangs around 10%. Not bad at all for a cheap netbook!

 

I have to read up on that. I have dual Netburst Xeons on my HP xw8200 (that feature check bypass could allow me to run Windows 8.1 x 64 perhaps)

*** Edit **** (I see that what I typed below was mentioned after the post I replied to)
One thing that seems to not be mentioned is how old of hardware could be used to run the 32-bit version of Windows 10. Could a Pentium III (say around 800 MHz) run it with enough RAM to offset the low speed?

 

hello,
how did you manage to install w10 final release if install.wim is not openable.
Can i ask you to lead me how to get it ?
Currently on W7 SP1 (fully updated with WX tray) x86 - activated.

 

Have you checked the tutorials?
Windows 10 - Upgrade Installation - Windows 10 Forums

Rich

 

Hi, I have an old Dell Dimension 3000 which failed the NX test, although it told me I could upgrade and even gave me the windows icon on the toolbar. I really need to update it to Windows 10 for my daughter, so please let us know when such a workaround/patch (like the Windows 8 version posted elsewhere in this thread) is available because I would love to add the machine to your growing list.
Thanks,

Roberto.

 

This was a fun project today. Pentium 4 631 (Jan 2006) 3.0 ghz with 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM and a Radeon 5450 1GB graphics card. Setup was slow to get going, and lagged at certain points, but made it through. Update was a bit slow too, but it had no trouble getting drivers in for all the hardware, mainboard & graphics, etc. I didn't have to do any searching. CPU likes to get up to 99% and RAM around 50%. It plays youtube vids for the kids well enough using Edge, the first machine I'll try that browser out on. Have it HDMI'd to a 32 inch samsung hanging on the wall. We'll see if it holds up.

 

Is it related to Pentium 4 PCs ??