or you can try to obtain the rare Intel P4 SL8JX processor and install that one onto your old socket 478 computer, spapakons (it's kinda like trying to win the lottery) as the SL8JX cpu seems to be the only 478-based pentium 4 that may have NX support (and even if that one does have NX support, the motherboard BIOS needs to show that NX option in bios setup and turn it on)
No, I'm not giving any money at this old PC! I rather buy a refurbished which will be much faster. It is Pentium 4 2.8GHz, not even a decent Prescott! The motherboard supports only IDE devices, no SATA, so it cannot be upgraded to SSD to boost performance. The RAM is SDRAM, and this cannot be upgraded also. I had trouble using it with a USB mouse and keyboard (before loading Windows) as the USB legacy probably wasn't enabled (might be auto) and I could not go into BIOS to fix it. So anyone having old PS/2 keyboards and mice DO NOT throw them away! Keep them! After several attempts I managed to boot using Windows 7 DVD (see below) and the keyboard was working but not the mouse! Not even the USB Flash drive containing the necessary Windows files and the patch could be detected! So I had to burn a DVD with the files in order to proceed! Nightmare, but I want to do it anyway! Read below for the method...
Back in 2012 when Windows 8.0 (first version) was released I realized it cannot be installed to a Pentium 4 socket 478 computer because it doesn't support PAE/NX! The same is true for Windows 8.1 and 10. In order to install them, you have to bypass the system check so Windows Setup won't complain and proceed. You also have to patch some specific system files to skip the relevant checks and load Windows. I had this guide below and I succeeded to install Windows 8.0 on an old Pentium 4 (socket 478):
[Q] Win 8, bypass PAE/NX/SSE2 check | Page 6 | My Digital Life Forums
If you read the Guide you will see that we need install.wim file from sources folder in Windows DVD. The problem is that newer Windows 10 versions have install.esd instead, so we have to convert install.esd to install.wim first! So we copy all files from Windows 10 32-bit ISO to a folder and then we follow this Guide to convert esd to wim:
How to Convert ESD to WIM File on Windows 10? – TheITBros
Normally we would copy all Windows files to a USB Flash drive along with the tools, but in an old computer like mine you might need to burn them to a DVD instead. Then we boot the target PC with Windows 7 DVD and when the Windows Setup screen appears we press SHIFT+F10 to get an elevated command prompt. We then follow the Guide above to run diskpart to clean all the contents of the hard disk, create a new partition and format is as NTFS. We use imagex to extract the necessary files from install.wim into the hard disk, then we use the tools to patch the files and make the disk bootable. Hopefully upon restart Windows 10 Setup will resume and install Windows 10. You then have to patch the files again before loading Windows 10.
I'm in the middle of the process, I'll let you know if it worked...
ABORT MISSION! The patch is too old and displays an error that it cannot patch winload.exe, so it didn't work! I'll install Windows 7 instead, pity...
The MCT always makes an ISO with an install.esd, but if you want an ISO with an install.wim you can get one direct from Microsoft. Use Option Three here.
Download Windows 10 ISO File
I'm just waiting for a post on whether Windows 10 will run on a 70s / 80s computer e.g. PDP-11 having a 16 bit CPU, 32k internal memory and a 10MB hard drive.
Win10 really doesn't work well if at all on the 16-bit programs. My son just returned a Notebook I "loaned" him some 15-20 years ago [needed some pictures off it], has WinXP on a Pentium III 1GHz CPU and 384MB RAM with a 30GB HDD, all on a Compal motherboard, didn't like the it at all when I tried to run setup from a 32-bit Win10 DVD [just had to check]. If I really needed to use it I'd probably put a version of Linux on it. The company Compal made/makes a lot of motherboards for generic/no name computers and probably for the "biggies".
It would be possible with an updated version of the patch that can patch the newer versions of winload.exe and ntoskrnl.exe (Windows 8.1 and 10). I tried to cheat by replacing the original files with the already patched versions from Windows 8.0 but I forgot to set the boot manager to no integrity check and I could not boot. In theory it could work. If it did (maybe I'll try it again some time), you would need to either disable Windows Update or replaced the updated files with the patched files after every major update. If anyone has a Windows 8.0 DVD or USB he could try patching these files and then replacing the original Windows 10 files with the patched ones (this should be done after gimagex and before restarting).
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