Windows 10: Windows 10 on 2004 PC?

Thanks.

I've now enabled the Realtek sound and Win 10 found the drivers OK. My only problem is enabling the onboard nForce 4 LAN causes Win 10 to crash at random (and was probably the cause of the original upgrade failure). Win 10 finds a driver for it but stability is only restored by disabling the LAN in the BIOS. I've imaged the configured PC without the LAN for the time being.

I'm using a TP-Link USB WiFi adapter but I'd like to get the LAN connection working. Will continue to investigate

 

With MSInfo32, you can see shared IRQs & Conflicts, and memory assignments - this may help you to decide if there are devices you can disable in device manager to allow you to re-enable the LAN NIC in BIOS, so it will work.

 

Thanks. I renabled the LAN in the BIOS and all is now fine I don't know what the original problem was. I have two NVidia nForce Networking Controller drivers on the system - one by MS and the other by NVidia. Windows 10 has decided to use the 2012 MS driver so I've left it alone now it's working.

The old PC is humming along quite well now I've moved over to using a cheap 128GB Plextor SSD. I also found 4GB PC3200 RAM for under £20 so that's the next step.

That Plextor SSD shows connected at 1.5Gb/s according to HWInfo whereas the nForce 4 chipset supports up to 6Gb/s. I can't work out why it is connecting at the lower speed but doubt it makes much real world difference.

I think I'll keep this old PC as a working backup PC and museum exhibit to see how long it can keep going!

 

I decided to try installing Windows 10 64 bit on this old PC now I'm content the 32 bit version works OK. However I'm having installation problems - see post 23 at I can't boot from any media to do the clean install

 

Hi Steve, just stumbled across this thread, and it has brought back some memories for me as I had a machine based on the ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe board for many years (from 2004 until I sold the tower for £20 complete with peripherals in 2015)

I didn't really try using it much with Windows 10 until I was getting ready to get rid of it, because I wanted to test that everything worked and I also wanted to see if I could use "compatible with the new Windows 10!" as a selling point in the ad! I can't remember if I tried x86 or the x64 version, but I know that it ran quite well and without a hitch. It was speedy enough, but that was with just the base OS installed.

One thing I do remember about this board on the whole though, was that when I tried it with 4GB RAM it played up no end (this was pre-Windows 10) For many years the system had 1 and 2GB RAM and then when I went to go to the max of 4GB late on in its lifetime, I noticed that it became very unstable and actually seemed a lot slower too. So I went for 2x1GB and 2x512MB to give 3GB RAM which seemed much more stable. I would recommend a dual-core for this board if you can find one, I was lucky enough to find an Athlon 4200 x2 CPU 10 years or so ago for a good price at the time.

 

Thanks - do you remember if you got Windows 10 64 bit to install?

I found 4GB really cheap memory which has run Memtest for 6 hours with out error so that seems OK. I also found a really cheap claimed working Athlon 64 x2 4200 on eBay and added a basic SSD I can reuse. This is just a hobby/retirement interest really to see how far I can push old technology. I do have other proper computers!

 

I honestly don't remember which edition I was running, I would lean more towards thinking it would have been the 64-bit version, but then I do remember when I had Windows 8 x64 on that PC, I'm sure there was some reason it wouldn't let me update to 8.1 and I have a vague memory of reverting to 32-bit so I could install the Windows 8.1 update, so maybe that was the same for Windows 10.

That's handy that you've got the 4GB RAM working. I always seemed to have more problems with this board when all four banks were full, which also slows down the bus speed due to some chipset limitation. I never had any issues with just 2 banks when I had 2GB RAM. Back in the day I used to spend a lot of time on the ASUS message board when I had this board and some posters were adamant that they got this mb working with 8GB RAM (they would buy 2GB server RAM modules) I never got round to trying it, maybe that's a project for you *Wink

Interested to know how you got on with an SSD on this machine, just out of curiosity of course. I was going to chance getting one at one stage but because it doesn't have an AHCI controller, I never did as I didn't think it would run optimally. Does it make a massive difference over a mechanical SATA drive for you?

I know what you mean about the hobby of pushing old tech - got a Super Socket 7 board somewhere with a K6-2 500 and 512MB RAM, don't have the facility (case, psu) to fire it up sadly. But it was kind of fun getting Windows 10 working on the Asus A8N

 

I only bought a cheap Plextor 128GB SSD and it does make a huge difference. I just connected it and it works. HWInfo reports it connecting at 1.5GB/s whereas the A8N-SLI supports 3GB/s. I doubt it makes much real world difference on the PC.

I'm still trying various devious means to install Windows 10 64 bit!

 

I've tried all means to install Windows 10 64 bit on the A8N-SLI motherboard and all attempts fail with the PC hanging at the first reboot. I've gone back to the 32 bit Windows installation which is fine but I can only use 3GB RAM.

Please advise if anyone has cracked installing Windows 10 64 bit on 2004 vintage PCs like the A8N-SLI. I'm actually surprised I managed to install the 32 bit version of Windows 10.

 

The CMPXCHG16b instruction is most likely not present in the processor's instruction set for the AMD Athlon 64 3000+ . This processor would have predated the specification, which was implemented as a requirement for the Windows 8.1 64-bit OS, preventing some Windows 8 AMD x64 systems from upgrading to Windows 8.1.

There are several versions of this Socket 939 CPU out there - which one do you have?

Check on List of AMD Athlon 64 microprocessors - Wikipedia to start with, and run the Sysinternals Coreinfo.exe program to check if the instruction is present.

 

I ran CoreInfo before I tried the 64 bit installation and it reported CX16 - Supports CMPXCHG16B instruction.

CPUZ reports the processor is a AMD Athlon 64 3000+, Winchester version , core stepping DH8-D0 installed in an Asus A8N-SLI Socket 939 motherboard.

In theory the CPU should satisfy the requirements for 64 bit Windows 10. The PC is quite stable in 32 bits using the Windows 10 installed drivers. I have a Plextor SSD connected to a SATA port and note the driver selected for this is Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller. I did locate a modified NForce 4 NVidia SATA driver from the Winraid site which works but the Plextor SSD tools fail to recognize the drive using this driver.

I enclose the CoreInfo, CPUZ reports & and a device manager screenshot. I still suspect a BIOS incompatibility or driver problem when trying to install the 64 bit version of Windows 10. Any ideas?
coreinfo.txtcpuz.txt

 

Sorry Steve - it does not support the CX16 instruction, note the lack of an asterisk *, and the presence of a hyphen - next to it, in your Coreinfo.txt

* = yes
but
- = no.

So, 64-bit versions of neither Windows 8.1, nor Windows 10 will install or run on it.

Code: ... CMOV * Supports CMOVcc instruction CLFSH * Supports CLFLUSH instruction CX8 * Supports compare and exchange 8-byte instructions CX16 - Supports CMPXCHG16B instruction BMI1 - Supports bit manipulation extensions 1 ...[/quote]

 

[/quote] Thanks. I've marked the thread closed due to hitting this brick wall.