Windows 10 on 2004 PC?

Success :)

I now have Win 10 Pro running on my 13 year old PC! I had two failed update attempts which I solved by disabling unneeded peripherals in the BIOS and ensured I used either MS drivers or the very latest Win 7 drivers before upgrading. I just ran setup.exe from a USB stick created by the Media Creation Tool and Win 10 auto activated. The PC chugs along OK so long as you do one thing at a time. I haven't 'optimised' it yet.

This PC originally had Win XP. I clean installed Win 7 Ultimate using a cheap licence then upgraded to Win 10 Pro as above.

I have a couple of queries:

1. Can I go back to Win 7 after a couple of weeks or is my licence key now tied to this PC on Win 10?
2. I found some really cheap PC3200 memory. Will MS activation complain if I increase the RAM to 4GB?

I've posted some screen shots as proof.
Attachment 161032Attachment 161034Attachment 161035

Well done!

You can revert to 7 if you wish, the Windows 7 product key remains valid, if you do not wish to continue using Windows 10.

A 4GB RAM upgrade will not affect activation, and will allow the system to run better. A SSD upgrade would make a big difference.

Imaging your current Windows 10 installation using Macrium Reflect or similar will allow you to speedily return to Windows 10 in the future on this machine if wished.

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.

Fafhrd said:

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!

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.

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

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