Windows 10: Should I upgrade this PC to Windows 10 or should I not?

I have a Medion MD96360 laptop from 2007. It contains an AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56 processor with 1.8 GHz, an ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 graphics card and 2 GB of RAM. Currently I have Windows 7 on this machine and it is working, but it is slow. Watching YouTube videos in fullscreen with 720 pixels does not work without stuttering.

I notice that there are no newer drivers for the graphics card; the Windows Upgrade tool tells me that this card would not be supported under Windows 10. For Windows 10 I found the advice to uninstall its driver and to use the "Basic Display Adapter" from Microsoft as a driver.

What would you expect to happen, if I upgrade this machine to Windows 10?

:)

 

should I use the Upgrade this PC now or USB boot option?

I'm pretty confident my Sept 2015 system is supported:

i7-4790K 4 GH CPU, 240 GB SSD, 16 GB RAM, 4 GB GPU, 27" 4k monitor.

Its seems like I'd be better off buying a new SSD to install Win 10 on, then use my "old" SSD as a fast scratch disk, after everything is transferred and up and running.

The Windows 10 update from Windows 7 and 8 on my other two machines went really well, so I was hoping for the same with this one.

Don

 

should I use the Upgrade this PC now or USB boot option?

Without a doubt, the safest and best way to install an operating system is with a clean install. That means erasing your hard drive and installing everything from scratch. It's like the difference between making brownies from a mix and from scratch. There's
no comparison.

On the other hand, a clean install is one of most technically advanced things you can do with a computer, so you've got to have the knowledge and experience to do it.

An upgrade also requires a lot of technical expertise - people don't realize that - but it's not quite as difficult as a clean install. On the other hand, an upgrade is a crapshoot while a clean install on supported hardware is a sure thing.

That brings me to my last point: If your hardware isn't supported on Windows 10, an upgrade and a clean install will both fail, either immediately or in the future.

 

It's unlikely that you'll have a good experience running Windows 10 on this machine. You're not enjoying it with Windows 7, and the lack of hardware support from Windows 10 is only going to exacerbate your headache.

 

Why not just make an image of your current system, then upgrade and clean install of Win10 / Win7 dual boot? That way you can evaluate the performance, assess whether it meets your requirements, without any risk of losing valuable data.

 

The Microsoft Basic display drivers usually give much worse performance than specialized ones for the adapter.

I'm a little surprised that YouTube videos run poorly under Windows 7 on that laptop. I have a 2008 Compaq with a QL60 CPU and an nVidia 8200m g graphics controller. (That has drivers approved for Win 10.) It's perfectly happy with 720P YouTube videos under Win 10 Home X64.

If real Windows 7 drivers exist, it may be possible to install those in Win 10. (It's a little hard to tell. Win 7 could use XP drivers, XDDM, but Windows 8 and 10 require WDDM ones.)

I'm not sure I'd recommend upgrading to Win 10 from 7. From 8.1, sure.

 

Can you use CPU Z
CPU-Z | Softwares | CPUID
to explain what motherboard you happen to be using? It should also be able to tell you exactly the RAM usage is and if you have a slot available. Using that to explain the motherboard here, a quick google check can verify if you can use more than 2 GB of ram in that system, therefore make it much more usable. Right now 2GB is your ouch point right now.

Is it running 32bit as well, or 64 Bit? Those are important because high VRAM GPU's will suffer on a 32 bit system. Or at least I've had problems, prior to arriving to 64 Bit.

Also, I'm checking now to see if that ATI can take a newer drive (MS can really burn when it comes to telling me my video card drivers are out dated. The people who worked far more R&D into them know more than MS when it comes to that)

And ouch. As far as I can tell, last driver support was "24 Feb 2010" for that GPU. That being a stock driver--now if only you were on a nvidia card..... sigh, well, don't fret, on to the Legacy Mod sites!

It appears the legacy mod drivers are infact alive, but.... I've never used them... It would be new territory for you.

Realistically, overall, you need more RAM.

 

Thanks for your opinions so far!

I am running 32 bit Windows, but with an AMD Turion 64...

Let me comment on some of your hints in more detail:

Can you tell with more words, why you think that video playback should be working better for me? Am I missing something essential? Is it just my fault (wrong drivers or whatever) that it's working so slow?

The latest drivers for the graphics card have the version 8.593 and are for Windows Vista:
Legacy

In the meantime I found a thread on the graphics card in Windows 10:
ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 graphic adaptor driver - Microsoft Community
In this thread, if I understand correctly what she writes, then CynthiaCooper got the Windows Vista driver to run under Windows 10.

I have never used a driver from a Legacy Mod site...

The motherboard is by MEDION, a modell SAM2010.
Chipset: ATI Xpress 200 (RS480) Rev. 10
Southbridge: ATI SB400 Rev. 80

BIOS:
Brand: American Megatrends Inc.
Version: A1058AM7 V7.27
Date: 04/25/2008

RAM:
2 Slots, Dual-Channel, each filled with 1024MB DDR2 RAM
PC2-5300 (333MHz)

What does that mean for the amount of RAM possible?

 

Alright, I've found nothing for or against putting more RAM in the motherboard. What I was getting at, as I've experienced it myself. Is that motherboard sometimes get picky on how much RAM they can handle, and how fast it goes. Real picky.

In THEORY, you should be able to upgrade to 4G, or 8GB, Newegg lists mushkin as cheapest at the 4 GB, and 8GB. 149$s for the 8GGb. Doing so would give you more head room in using Windows 10, especially since 4 Gig is recommended when using Win 7 anyhow.
Computer Hardware, Memory, Laptop Memory, DDR2 667 (PC2 5300), 4GB (2 x 2GB), 8GB (2 x 4GB) - Newegg.com


The other laptop, well, that's a GeForce 8200M, and its actually quite a bit superior to the ATI chip.

ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 - NotebookCheck.net Tech
The Xpress was a basically used for different setups, you'll find the 200 there.

NVIDIA GeForce 8200M G - NotebookCheck.net Tech

 

I'm going to leave the advice on drivers to those who know much more than me.

However I would definitely do this:

... in my case I would use Macrium Reflect Free, take an image of the whole disk onto an external USB drive, and also make sure I had created the bootable Rescue Media and tested that I could boot from it. Other backup tools allow you to do similar things.

Then you have a way back if it goes wrong.

I'd also say I've had reasonably good luck in getting my old laptop to work with Windows 10 (different hardware to yours, but a similar age) but I've needed to manually download and install some drivers which were designed for earlier versions of Windows. In some cases I needed to run the drivers' setup program in compatibility mode for the OS they came for. But I also know that some driver installers refuse to work in Windows 10.

 

A new i3 Laptop is running $280 bucks now I would forget this and get one, a 2007 laptop, 7 Years old, is not worth upgrading ram

 

I do not plan buying a new laptop and given that I would be able to get one for around 300 , I will definitely not pay 150 just for RAM.

If it really made the system perceivably faster (do you think it would?), then I would be willing to spent like 35 for 4GB of RAM.

 

Presuming that the ATI chipset is using some of the system RAM, that doesn't allow you to use the full 2GB for the OS, so while you would see SOME performance improvement by upgrading to 4GB, I don't really think it would be impressive. If there was a way to buy the RAM, try it out, and then return it if not satisfied, I would use that approach.

 

I have installed w10 on an even older/slower pc than yours and it's quite enjoyable. In fact, it may leave more available resources than Win7. Make a backup copy of your operating system partition and do a win10 CLEAN installation. Install the w7 drivers for your videocard and test how it works. What browser are you using? some browsers like chrome make it hard to have a good experience in Youtube for older cpus/vgas. Just check Youtube on Edge for instance.