W7 general performance on older machines

Hi everyone,

I loaded one of my older machines with W7 that previously had XPpro on it and I wanted to generate some discussion on the overall performance on older machine to see how others feel about it.

I put W7 on a Dell D810 with an upgraded 7200rmp 160G HD and 2 Gig of ram. I had an easy time of porting over my older applications to the machine and only had to re-install Office 2007. I generally do not take the standard "program files" install and put each of the apps in separate folders. I was surprised that I did not have to fool much with the registry keys and everything ported nicely.

I feel that the speed in operation enhancement claims are stretched. I have two other D810s with the same configuration, one with Server 2003 and the other with XP pro and overall I feel the Server 2003 machine has the best response.

I have had a time with drivers, especially the older SCSI cards both in the expansion slot on my docking station and the PCMCIA cards that I have.

I am tempted to turn down the graphical interface but if I wanted it to look like the old stuff, then I would have left it there.

If you have upgraded an older single core machine, let me know what your experience has been!

I would rate mine as moderately sluggish but worth the time....so far.

Thanks,

Eunix

I'm not running a single core now, but I did have one before my current one. There was never any problems as far as drivers on my single core. Windows update detected the drivers and set everything up very nicely.

I had one component I have to upgrade to stop glitching while watching movies and such. My onboard graphics worked well with Windows Aero but was not stable while graphically stressed. For my config, I had a simple solution with a PCIe x16 Graphics Card.

Windows 7 in my experience ran just as well as XP. I could however see Windows 7 running poorly on a system with less than 1GB memory where as XP ran quite nicely on 512MB for the most part.

My setup at the time of Install for Windows 7 was a Celeron D(352) 3.2-MHz single core with 1GB DDR-400 memory and Radeon Xpress 200 chipset which was upgraded to Radeon HD 4350.

Not sure if I'm supposed to post in this thread as I'm on a Intel i7, but i will say Windows 7 leaves XP or Vista way way behind

On a Dell Latitude D610, I installed Windows 7 without upgrading any parts. It has 2GB RAM. It knocks XP in the dirt on a machine that was made to run XP. I did adjust the performance options for maximum, that made it look clearer and run a tab faster. The only driver problem I had was a multimedia audio controller, but I have a driver disc for the laptop, so the sound restored quickly, and sounds better than XP Pro. Everything else worked fine, surprising for a 2005 model laptop. Just don't have the Aero graphics, and it scored 1.0 on the performance scale. But the other numbers were decent for that system.

Catilley, Thanks for the update on the D610. I had one for years for work and I have to say that it was a workhorse of a machine and why I bought a couple of D810s.

Here are my W7 performance numbers for the D810/2G/7200rpm disk :



Although the W7 perf rating is 3.6 and the X600 video card with WUXGA screen if very beautiful and crisp, it feels a little sluggish but a keeper!

Eunix

I'm actually considering installing Windows 7 on my Latitude C640. The screen looked much better than the D610 (when they were both on XP Pro). It has 1GB RAM, and if it's enough to fire up Win 2K Pro, it ought to handle Windows 7 with no problem. But I'm going to dual boot with XP if I do, as I need my printer.

If I were you, I would not waste my time on a C640. You will find the Pentium 4 and 1 Gig memory limit a little underwhelming. That machine will better serve you with XP or 2000 if you still have a copy of that. It makes a great Ubuntu or Puppy machine also. I tested Vista on one of those when vista first came out and it was not pretty. W7 is not that much different than Vista which I still run on my multi-core machines.

I you do give it a shot, let me know how it works.

Eunix

I voted "Moderately Improved Performance - Worth It" in this case, if it was Vista then it's a hands down winner.

I have Windows 7 running on a 1.3Ghz Intel Mobile CPU + 1GB ram, and the performance seens slightly better than XP. It's certainly not any slower, that's for sure.

Just got through doing the install today, a little more complicated than the D610, but I pulled it off. On only 22GB of space, dual booting with Win 2K Pro. Still have one issue, but it's working fine at the moment.

Awesome! I am glad that you made it through it - especially the dual boot. I take it that you are using the W7 boot loader and having it load the older nt boot loader for the Win 2K pro.

I would like to hear how you managed the small system partition that W7 wants to create during the install.

Eunix