Using older hardware? Windows7 is worth it!
I had an interesting request recently… A friend and I were discussing Windows7 and the improvements even for older computers. We decided to see just how it would do on “old-school” hardware.
Both of us are open source geeks and often laugh at the bloat that is Windows. I must admit, the results were surprising.
Here’s the specs we had:
The install was pretty straight forward but did have two issues to overcome.
The first was that Windows7 ships standard on DVD media. Our hardware only has a CD drive. The solution… Tiny7, allows you to install only the minimal required files to get you a running windows 7 operating system on CD. Ready to download Tiny7? Download this zipped Disc ISO file.
The second was that the age of this hardware prohibited it from supporting EFI booting. We used Smart BootManager to force boot of the installation media.
Smart BootManager is an OS independent BootManager which has an easy to use interface and many other features. The main goals of SBM are to be absolutely OS independent, flexible and full-featured. It has all of the features needed to boot a variety of Operating Systems.
The SBM software is Linux based so, for the windows folks out there I have created a zipped disk image which can be placed on a 1.44MB floppy disk using rawrite32. Linux users may also write the image to disk using the “dd” command.
I should mention that we had to tweak services to improve performance and enable certain needed features. As an example, our application required support for Network Browsing which did not function properly until the Workstation service was started. The simple way to solve this issue is to set all “Disabled” services to “Manual”. Doing so allows Windows to start services on an as needed basis.
Once installed we quickly discovered much improved performance over windowsXP. This is a direct result of better memory and overall resource management. So in conclusion, kudos to Microsoft and the Windows7 Development Team. If you are using older hardware and need better performance, Windows7 is worth it!
