What the BSOD message was? If you tried to install Windows 10 32-bit, then you may have to enable NX/PAE in BIOS and try again or just your CPU doesn't support NX/PAE, so you cannot install Windows 8 or 10. If this is the case, then you must install Windows 7. Check BIOS settings and then try again. You can also tell us your CPU and laptop model to check specifications and let you know,
How did @Fafhrd bypass that check with his Celeron-M?
On a side note I got an older 32bit linux on my original Pentium-M 780 and I got it to playback a recently encoded h.264 1080p24 movie without dropping frames or losing audio sync so that's the benchmark to hit if I ever get into windows. Currently windows 7 is bog slow(compared to linux) and that's even with a WDDM graphics driver.
An experience: when I first joined the Technical Preview 'way back' I had 2 Dell Desktop computers I rehabbed instead of going to landfill, one is the standard-size OptiPlex 755 and the other is an SFF Inspiron 530S. Both used a flavor of Intel Express G31/G33/Q33/Q35 Graphics Controller and about the time the program was changed to Insider Preview there were no longer any drivers for the onboard adapters. I ended up putting in ATI Radeon 2400 HD cards and haven't had problems since. I have no actual cost as I used parts from computers junked for other reasons.
The only drawback if it can be called that is the 530S has a 10/100 Ethernet port so I use an 802.11n Wireless dongle to get better download speeds. Because of the add-in card there's not enough room to promote cooling.
Linux has fewer than half the modules (called services in Windows) than Windows running, that's why it is faster. But this also means that has fewer features enabled by default. If you enable all the respective features as Windows have by default, then Linux will also be dead slow. You can also disable any unused services in Windows 10 and make it faster, avoid Linux, unless you are advanced user and know what you are doing. Windows is best for the average (novice) user.
I'm not trying to say one is better. I just wanted to build some baselines so if I can do something in one OS I should try to match that in another. I was speaking generally about linux. Some distros are much heavier than others if you go with the default configuration. Funny thing I ended up going back to the same distro I tested this Dell XPS M170 with when I started this thread. I tried a more modern 32bit linux build (fedora) and it was pretty laggy although I didn't really dig too deep into it.
Once I get another drive for this Dell XPS M170 testing platform I'll try Win10 again if I can figure out how to bypass the NX check.
I'm just pretty happy I'm able to watch some modern 1080p movies on this thing during the lockdown.
edit: lol not that this is my only machine I have much more modern daily driver machines. It's just fun doing real 'work' or 'entertainment' on these old machines.
Last edited by shaocaholica; 27 Mar 2020 at 14:12.
If the CPU doesn't support NX/PAE you must hack winload.exe and ntoskrnl.dll files in order to bypass the test and install Windows 8 or 10. I had downloaded the PAE patch that works in Windows 8 and 10 up to some old build, it doesn't work in newer builds. Windows 8 would not check for signature in the hacked files and you could run it without any problems, except you needed to patch the files again after a version upgrade because they were overwritten. Windows 10 did check the signatures and would deny to load at normal mode, you should run it in test mode only, not really convenient, but it worked. I could not find any modern version of PAE patch that works in current Windows 10 builds. If you want to play fair and avoid hacks, your only option is to install Windows 7 32-bit. Then you can use the Windows XP graphics driver (XPDM) that enables full hardware acceleration for the graphics card. This should make the computer as fast as would be with Windows XP, whereas installing Windows 8 or 10 will force Microsoft Basic Display Adapter and make it much slower. Please do not waste your time trying to install a newer Intel WDDM graphics driver, it won't work, I have already tried. You will stuck with MBDA and zero acceleration (VERY slow).
Thanks appreciate it! That's what I figured.
I am afraid that it's the installer that's faulty, not Windows 10 itself, the installer just cannot work properly on old hardware - perhaps someone clever will come up with some Franken-Windows Installer from Windows 10 10240 from 2015 that will run 2004 installation on old hardware without any issues.
There's no bypass on the NX feature, it is available on that processor - run Sysinternals coreinfo to check, I did earlier in this thread as far as I can recall. I'll trawl back to find it.
I downloaded a compressed book tracker program for our church's library, decompressed it into a folder. It would not install on Win10 but it was because the installer part was 16-bit. Looking in the folders I found a setup.exe file and tried it, installed and worked.
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