New
#31
I ran Windows 7 (32-bit) on a mini desktop that originally came with Windows XP Professional just fine when Windows 7 first came out in 2009 on 2GB of ram but these days 2GB just doesn't cut even on 32-bit.
Even a old PC close to 10 years old that originally came with Windows XP can run Windows 7/8.1/10 just fine if the hardware was consider high end back then, where talking about desktop hardware that old but still just pretty much as powerful as some Windows tablets on the market today; the real question is...can the old PC hardware support more than 2GB of memory that is recognized and useable in the OS.
Yup nothing else to say, same way your chain of thoughts work...empty.
I stand corrected if it's a hardware incompatibility with Windows 10 itself but at the same time I still stand by any machine that can run Windows 7 (32-bit) can run Windows 10 (32-bit) at least the final version of Windows 10 not the beta's.
The drivers built into Windows 10 should be improved for older hardware if anything over Windows 7 but the BIOS of the old PC maybe another thing.
It seems that many Intel processors up to about ten years old will run the Windows 10 previews released up till now, but there's no saying if the RTM versions will work. It was a similar position with Windows 8 when the Release Preview would not run on processors that would not pass certain CPU feature checks - PAE, SSE2, NX, CMPXCHG16B, and so on, even though the earlier preview releases worked OK.
Nobody here in this thread has yet posted about a system with Windows 10 IP running on an AMD CPU, since some older (at the time, some as old as six years were affected!) AMD processors, such as Athlon 64 X2, have been problematic with Windows 8.1 64-bit version. Microsoft has apparently been unconcerned with their disaffected AMD users.
As far as memory is concerned, any system with 1GB or more will install Windows 10, but with the 32-bit version, you will be limited as always, to about 3.6GB of useable RAM, so amounts like 2GB are middle of the road as far as usage is concerned.
This thread was intended as a bit of fun, and people making off-topic, unfounded, and untrue statements such as that by Nemix tend to get in the way of the enjoyment. That's why I answered with "Nope." I could have said something else
With regard to this, is there a way to run windows 10 on a flash drive for testing? It would be much easier to run a live version like you can do with linux, to just test the hardware compatibility. Is it possible to install windows 10 on a usb stick?