Let's run Win10 on really really old hardware

Until a couple of hours ago, I was liking 1903 on this old system. Then along came "Windows Hello"!

After logging on, blue windows setup screen with "Please wait ..." below the circle of rotating dots, then the graphics switched off, upsetting the TV monitor it was connected to, which switched off the display then Windows switched on the graphics again and the monitor displayed the source device that was playing - PC, then Please wait etc...It also intermittently switched off the USB connections to keyboard, mouse and the WiFi dongle I use.

After returning from the dog's walk, I entered Safe Mode (I use the legacy text only boot menu especially for this purpose) with F8 and 4, and ran " netplwiz" from the Safe mode command prompt to exclude password being asked for on startup.

And after a few burps in the graphics stability, everything went back to normal.

Now how will I explain this in Feedback Hub?

Unofficially there is a method to extract the files from install.wim into a USB Flash drive, make the partition bootable and add some other stuff to make it a valid Windows-to-Go installation.

No It's not Unofficial and is legit, it's documented on Technet:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com...p-by-step.aspx

2. Next you need to apply the operating system image that you want to use with Windows To Go on the operating system partition you just created on the disk (this will take up to 30 minutes or longer, depending on the size of the image and the speed of your USB connection). The following command shows how this can be accomplished using the Deployment Image Servicing and Management command-line tool (DISM), note that the index number must be set correctly to a valid Enterprise image in the .WIM file:

dism /apply-image /imagefile:n:\imagefolder\deploymentimages\mywtgimage.WIM /index:1 /applydir:W:\
Be sure to specify a WIM file that contains a sysprep generalized image.

3. Now use the bcdboot command line tool to move the necessary boot components to the system partition on the disk. This helps ensure that the boot components, operating system versions, and architectures match. The /f ALL parameter indicates that boot components for UEFI and BIOS should be placed on the system partition of the disk. The following example illustrates this step:

W:\Windows\System32\bcdboot W:\Windows /f ALL /s S:

Tenforums' predecessor and sister site Eightforums has a tutorial for Window 8 To Go on similar lines, and Wolfgang has a tutorial here on tenforums:
Setup and Run Windows 10 on USB Flash Drive
so it MUST be legit!:)

"Windows To Go" for Windows 10 on USB 2.0, all that is available on most older laptops, is not feasible because data reads and writes are just too slow in use. I have a windows 8.0 preview release "Windows To Go" on a 16GB Sandisk Cruzer blade which still runs only just usably on the Travelmate and other better specced machines.

USB 3.0 was not released until November 2008. It is possible to use a USB 3.0 adapter expansion card on a Desktop machine, but that's definitely "Cheating" with newer hardware being added!:)

In 2006, when the Travelmate was built, the maximum size of USB flash sticks was 2GB, and cost a lot more than pocket money!

Anyway, what's the difference do you think, between using a USB device as a vehicle, which is newer hardware, to add a drive volume to your system, than using a VHD, around since windows 7, which is Microsoft software technology available with Windows 10 natively?

This thread is called "Let's run Win10 on really really old hardware" not "Let's install Win10 on really really old hardware"!

If the old hardware runs unmodified Windows 10 code from Microsoft, natively, as on a VHD, but will not install using Windows Setup, then there are errors or intentional barriers, (can I say, "Bugs"?) in the setup software.

It is not cheating to use workarounds to get Microsoft software to run on any hardware, people have been doing these things since personal computers became available. I can recall a time with MSDOS that you had to buy 3rd-party "memory extenders" to run certain software or "memory expanders" until MS introduced Himem.Sys with MSDOS 5.1 in 1991.

Native VHDs run with virtually no speed difference than from the disk, and as I mentioned above can be zipped in situ, and expanded either across a network, or from attached external storage in about 30 minutes on old hardware like mine. For me it's the way to go.

I've been doing this for a long time, before you joined Tenforums, Spapakons, see my other contributions to this thread. I know how to maximise the chances of success with an installation on unsupported old machines by disabling onboard devices. I have even gone to the extent of removing built-in Wifi cards, DVD writer, and all USB devices and disconnecting from the LAN. I bought an IDE SSD to speed up the system and increase the capacity of the main drive from 60GB to 120GB, but the system fails to boot from the device, recognising it in BIOS, but not driving it properly, so I had to revert to an IDE HDD.

Not a 64-bit processor, 32-bit only., never used Gimagex, no usable drivers for this old hardware to download, maximum 2GB RAM. Flash drive on USB 2.0 too slow to use realistically for Windows 10 to go, life is too short. I have verified that this machine is running the latest version of Windows 10 with good speed on VHD natively booted, with screenshots. Said this all before. I am also perfectly capable of converting ESD to WIM files using DISM etc.

Installation fails because Setup.exe cannot run on the hardware. Believe me. Windows 10 version 1903 runs fine on it.

Managing devices in BIOS is extremely hard to do with the sort of very limited BIOS that Acer put on cheap laptops in 2006,and the lack of continuing driver support, since the XP drivers it came with were supported by Vista, and Windows 7 i.e. up to 2009. Why should Acer bother to waste money supporting 4 year old equipment since it had made dozens of newer systems, and sold many millions of them, in the meantime?

This machine did install Windows 10 up to the anniversary update 1607, after that, not successful. One experiment I have been meaning to do but never got around to it was transplanting a current Windows 10 version install.wim into the sources folder of a 1607, or even a Windows 8 setup ISO contents.

The drivers that are not being installed or found are old XPDM drivers that Windows 10 does not support, with installation not supported even in compatibility mode. Believe me, I've tried every way I can. Although there is no BSOD during Windows Setup, it fails because it installs Generic Windows drivers that cause memory leaks, or system interrupts that block setup and WinPE progress by using up all CPU capacity causing setup to freeze.

Here's two examples of Windows PE:

- from Windows 8 reserves 256MB of video memory, and the ramdisk likes to use a similar amount of memory to run the "X: drive" from. Its because of the historical amount of installed RAM in systems that were around in 2012.

but, WindowsPE 10 reserves 1.0GB of Video memory, and the ramdisk is also about 1 GB, reflecting more recent hardware.

Note that Windows PE does not use a pagefile or swapdisk.

That's why Windows 10 will not install on systems with less than 2GB of RAM,without difficulty. Sometimes Windows 10 setup requests spare disk space to hold setup files if it cannot find sufficient free space on the installation drive.

On a 2 GB maximum installed RAM as in many older systems, during setup, there is very little free memory to cope with buffer overruns due to generic drivers failing to run essential core devices or services correctly. There is no telemetry when you shut down a failed Windows setup session, so Microsoft remains blissfully ignorant of the situation (especially if during setup,

You have to disable in BIOS all devices (sound, LAN, Wi-Fi, camera etc, if applicable) to prevent Windows Update installing faulty drivers during installation and hang the system.

you are trying to not let the system screw up!

This is the challenge!

Chipset drivers are not supported, and the Intel 915 graphics are not supported, even the USB drivers are not fully supported.

See - Let's run Win10 on really really old hardware - Page 37 - Windows 10 Forums - then look at the mess in device manager where Windows 10 plug'n'play fails to identify the number of devices, and duplicates many of them - due to chipset drivers not being available to identify the system, yet windows 10 still runs.
Windows 7 ran fine without any device errors because it could use the XP driver set.

Setup since 1607 just does not work correctly with this system, yet the current version of Windows 10 will still run on it. Bottom line.

Thanks for your reply, Spapakons, it contains some excellent information.

However, I have a perfectly acceptable solution (in my opinion) that avoids external hardware altogether. I also avoid Setup and OOBE on my old machine both of which do not work correctly.

You see, many old hardware device manufacturers recognise that the device hardware IDs belong to an ACER OEM laptop, which Acer has licensed for its own OEM product, and they recommend that I go to the Acer Website for drivers, of course, which are for the XP operating system and no later Windows version.

Often, device drivers from devices made in 2006 or earlier were made for XP as if there were never going to be a successor to that OS, and indeed the unpopularity of Windows Vista, and the continued usage of XP as the most popular version of Windows ever, meant that the XP drivers were mostly usable in Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 until Windows 10, and only then were new drivers needed, since the XP drivers were deprecated in 10, and fail to install. Microsoft had to kill off its most successful offspring one way or another, and of course no-one with Windows 7 or 8.x has ever had to pay for a Windows 10 upgrade.

Only because of lack of application support for Windows XP, it is dying - few modern browsers support it, for instance, yet now Windows 7 supporters tenaciously cling on, and 7 is Microsoft's next target for termination, and Windows 10 is Microsoft's future pathway, allowing them to progress. Windows 8 was a step too far, and like Vista, was a non-starter.

I think that they are doing a pretty good job of it! Windows 10 gets leaner and smarter as the versions evolve. Despite the barriers to running old hardware...

I don't mind if Microsoft continues to try to exclude old hardware from running it by putting barriers in the way, I shall just try to circumvent them! One day they will win, but until then...

By natively installing Windows 10 on any PC that happily runs Windows 10, on a 40 GB VHD, and allowing it to run thru OOBE personalisations, and making any software installations, and modifications as far as I like to use Windows, I can zip that installation on a VHD file to a zipfile of 3.5 GB approximately. Over my network I can unzip that VHD to storage on disk (takes about 30 minutes) on any old machine on my network with space greater than 40GB available. Once the VHD has finished being unzipped, I can mount the VHD as a drive, use BCDBOOT to add it to the BCD Boot menu, and reboot.



When the PC boots up to this new bootmenu entry, it first sets itself up then does the best job it can with Generic Microsoft drivers to get all the devices working. Many devices fail, because Windows 10 has no workable drivers for this old chipset, LAN, Wifi, faxmodem etc, but it manages to get an image on screen, and by my one cheat, I admit, a more modern usb wifi dongle, which is supported by Windows 10, I can connect to the internet, and receive cumulative updates, and I can disable all those problem devices...

Only one more thing... ...activation - if the machine has a digital license, then it activates, but as I already posted here are ways to force this, if the installation has problems.

...and I know that soon, I will not be able to do this workaround, because Microsoft will create one final insurmountable barrier. C'est la vie!

Postscript.

I would ask anyone who has struggles with hardware that should be able to install and run Windows 10, but cannot, so far, to try this method. Once Windows works on older hardware it shouldn't be able to, then you can post on the feedback hub, and MS will realise that there are devices out there running Windows 10 that deserve their attention and their support.MS needs the telemetry to support their user base, so do not disable these services.

With the help of Fafhrd's posts I was able to install new versions (1809, 1903) on an old Dell Latitude D610 (with ATI X300). I booted the system with a 1709 USB-Stick (the last working version for this Laptop) and used the dism /Apply-Image... method with newest install.wim from a second USB-Stick. At first reboot I got oobe errors and I used the comands from this post to finish the setup. The system works a lot better than expected.