Win 10 Best Min Specs?

Cr00zng · 20 Oct 2018

Ztruker said:

If you decide to try Windows 10, please make an image backup to an external hard drive using Macrium Reflect before doing so. Then if things don't work out or something goes wrong you can restore the image and be up and running again with Windows 7 in 20 or 30 minutes.

It's good advise, but I doubt that the restore to Windows 7 with Macrium Reflect would complete in 20-30 minutes. Especially in my case with the single core Atom CPU.

There's also the limitation for the external storage transfer rate with USB 2.0 interfaces, 100 Mbit/s Ethernet connection and 54 Mbit/s Wi-Fi. Restoring ~20GBs with any of these interfaces would take a very long time. Not to mention that backing up Windows 7 with Macrium would take just as long.

The only way I see this feasible is to remove the drive from the Netbook, mount it in a PC and make an image of the drive with Macrium. If Windows 10 on the Netbook is way too slow, "like swimming in treacle" as Bree stated, just reverse the process. It's probably not worth the effort for this exercise.

CLuckeyJD · 20 Oct 2018

ignatzatsonic said:

>> What are your expectations? <<

Realistically low for limited system resources. In fact, I own 4 other laptops with latest Win 10 OS and specs shown apply to a Sony VAIO that serves as backup. So, I'm content if 2-3 open Chrome tabs, Word and either PowerPoint OR Excel run 12 hrs with regular periodic reboots. Is that doable by this aged Sony VAIO?

Also, is a 32- or 64-bit Win 10 OS my best option to maximize low resource efficiency?

eLPuSHeR · 20 Oct 2018

Replacing the slow 5400rpm hard disk for an SSD will do wonders. In fact, it will be like night and day. Older Atom processors aren't that good either but it should perform adequately for office/browsing Internet tasks.

The main reason for swapping the hdd for an ssd is the excruciatingly slow hard disk access for accessing the pagefile almost all the time. If you have 2GB, things will be much more bearable (even with a slow 5400rpm mechanical hd).

I clean formatted a 10+ years old pc the other day and it runs w10 quite satisfactory (1GB DDR2 RAM). HD is a SATA 7200rpm drive though. And microprocessor has got two cores. Every little bit helps.

CLuckeyJD · 20 Oct 2018

bro67 said:

Only issue would be display drivers not available and same for the ACPI device.

Does that mean hardware installed on an old machine before it left the factory could quit working after Win 10 upgrade? Is there some workaround to eliminate or significantly mitigate diminished system performance or total failure, like driver downloads from manufacturer's website or a 3rd-party program that can be run before, during or afterward?

RoasterMen · 20 Oct 2018

If you try upgrading the OS of your laptop to Windows 10, you'll end up with driver compatibility problems.

I doubt even an SSD will ever save that thing even if you did upgrade also the RAM.

Berton · 20 Oct 2018

CLuckeyJD said:

Does that mean hardware installed on an old machine before it left the factory could quit working after Win 10 upgrade?

Yes. I have 2 such Desktops where the onboard/built-in video is supported so I used Add-in Video cards on them.

CLuckeyJD said:

Is there some workaround to eliminate or significantly mitigate diminished system performance or total failure, like driver downloads from manufacturer's website or a 3rd-party program that can be run before, during or afterward?

Not really if the manufacturer of a device doesn't have updated drivers or provided updated drivers to Microsoft for inclusion.

Bat 1 · 20 Oct 2018

Guess it was about 4 Years ago (?) that just for "laughs and giggles" I install Win 10 Pro 32 bit on a Stock eMachines W3503 Specs - CNET Boot time with the 512MB of 400 RAM was over 10 minutes until I could click the mouse. Clicking on any browser with the roller ball it'd take approx 3 minutes before the homepage would come up. I actually ran it that way for prolly 6 Months and upgraded the version twice. Later I had a set of 2x1GB RAM came in so I Maxed it out. The Boot time decreased to 3-5 minutes :) That MOBO had SATA ports so I tried both a WD Blue 1TB mechanical as well as a Kingston 120GB SSD and there was actually No increase in performance. The Win 10 was by far more responsive than the original XP, along with with 7 and 8.1 as well as the 17 odd flavors of Linux I tried. Most of the drivers were the basic MS drivers and until I cannibalized it for parts, it was a decent enough Cam girl watching Rig.

Bree · 20 Oct 2018

Cr00zng said:

There's also the limitation for the external storage transfer rate with USB 2.0 interfaces, 100 Mbit/s Ethernet connection and 54 Mbit/s Wi-Fi. Restoring ~20GBs with any of these interfaces would take a very long time. Not to mention that backing up Windows 7 with Macrium would take just as long.

I wouldn't recommend using networking, but an external HDD on usb2 is practical...

The now-aging USB 2.0 standard can theoretically transfer data at a very high 480 megabits per second (mbps), or 60 megabytes per second (MBps).

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2360...-imagined.html

CrystalDiskMark shows I get a practical 30MB/s for an HDD on usb2. A windows install with a few other programs should be about 20-30GB, less for a 32-bit OS (my netbook with Win10+LibreOffice is just 15GB). At 30MB/s for a 30GB system that would take less about 15 minutes to transfer. Even with an Intel Atom the transfer speed will be the limiting factor, Macrium seems to have plenty of cpu time available to do its processing while it waits for the read/writes to complete.

bro67 · 20 Oct 2018

CLuckeyJD said:

Does that mean hardware installed on an old machine before it left the factory could quit working after Win 10 upgrade? Is there some workaround to eliminate or significantly mitigate diminished system performance or total failure, like driver downloads from manufacturer's website or a 3rd-party program that can be run before, during or afterward?

No. It means that there is some older hardware that the drivers that worked in Windows 7, may not work for devices when you run Windows 10. Intel has done a great job in keeping up, along with Linux, since the Core2 Duo CPU's are still used in a lot of computing devices, especially NAS systems. I went as far as replacing a Core2 Duo with a Core2 Quad Core on one machine and installed a Samsung 850Evo. Sucker runs better than it did with 7.

Cr00zng · 20 Oct 2018

Bree said:

CrystalDiskMark shows I get a practical 30MB/s for an HDD on usb2. A windows install with a few other programs should be about 20-30GB, less for a 32-bit OS (my netbook with Win10+LibreOffice is just 15GB). At 30MB/s for a 30GB system that would take less about 15 minutes to transfer. Even with an Intel Atom the transfer speed will be the limiting factor, Macrium seems to have plenty of cpu time available to do its processing while it waits for the read/writes to complete.

Generally you are correct, but your time estimate is off for my Netbook...

I haven't used USB 2.0 interface for awhile and just had to test it on my Netbook MSI U120, single core Atom CPU, SATA III SSD internal and external drives. I didn't have an HDD external drive handy.

Reflect backup to external SSD over USB 2.0 port 29 GBs "C" drive:

Win 10 Best Min Specs?-reflect-backup.jpg

That's around 46 MB/s read speed for the internal SSD and 25 MB/s write speed for the external SSD. I am not certain, if HDDs for both internal and external would have the same speed, but they'd probably would. It's pretty much the limitation of the USB 2.0 interface and to a certain extent, the single core CPU.

The same external SSD drive transfer rate to my main PC via USB 3.0 interface:

And for copy/paste a 4.5 GBs video from the external SSD to the Netbook via Windows Explorer:

Not too bad for a ten or so year old Netbook and I certainly underestimated its performance...

I did not try to restore the image, but it would probably take 20-30 minutes it seems...

Benchmark is just that, program that tries to replicate workloads. I prefer measuring actual workload performance...