Let's run Win10 on really really old hardware

After reading the recent posts I decided to take another look at upgrading to Windows 10. In doing so I realized I had never updated the BIOS. I now have the newest BIOS.

F.21	2004-09-18	First
F.35	2005-05-06	Last

I tried to install from a USB flash drive. I insert a USB flash drive in one of the USB ports and rebooted the computer. After I pressed the Escape key, I was shown the boot menu. Unfortunately, none of the options led to booting from the USB flash drive. Apparently, my laptop does not have the ability to boot from a USB flash drive.

I inserted a DVD with Windows 10 32-bit in the DVD drive. After I booted to Windows 7 Home, I ran the Windows 10 setup. I proceeded to update to Windows 10 Home. After about an hour the Windows 10 upgrade failed during the first boot phase. It automatically restored my computer back to Windows 7 Home.




After the computer booted back to Windows 7 Home. I shrank the size of the C: partition and created a new 25GB D: partition after it. This way hopefully I would end up with a dual-boot of Windows 7 Home and Windows 10 Home.

I rebooted and tried a clean install of Windows 10 Home on the D: partition. This ended with a failed install.




I was then shown the dual-boot menu. Unfortunately, selecting Windows 10 gave the same error.



I rebooted and tried a clean install of Windows 10 Home again. I deleted the D: partition and let Windows 10 do the partitioning and formatting in the unallocated space. This time the failure was different in that there was no error. Just a black screen after the computer shut down. Note the dual-boot menu was still there when I rebooted.

It was time for a more drastic action. I backed up the laptop’s hard drive and let the Windows 10 install start with a totally unallocated drive. This time the results were worse. I found out why the computer had shut down. When I booted the computer, I saw this. Then the computer rebooted and tried to start Windows 10 again which resulted in another blue screen. I powered down the computer to prevent the endless cycle.




Final thoughts…

Notes about my computer

• The laptop built in early or mid 2004.
• It has an early AMD Athlon 64 3400+ 2.2 GHz (Clawhammer, Socket 754). The results from CPU-Z show that it is a desktop CPU. I don’t think Mobile Athlon 64s were available until a year later.
• It has an nVidia nforce3 Go150 chipset. This is probably not as well supported in later versions of Windows like other chipsets are.
• It has a discrete nVidia GeForce4 440 Go graphics chip with 64 MB of dedicated RAM. Again OEM hardware not support by nVidia after Windows XP.

Even though some other people have managed to install Windows 10 on a computer with an AMD Athlon 64 I conclude this

• I suspect that they their computers were newer with newer versions of the Athlon 64 and newer and better supported chipsets.
• Some these computers were probably built right before or after Windows Vista was released. That meant they probably have Windows Vista drivers.
• My computer was a laptop. Laptops many times have manufacture specific drivers. Desktops tend to have more generally available hardware with better Windows support.

I had better luck installing Windows 10 on my laptop in April 2020. At least it booted to the desktop. I had to give up then because too much of hardware either didn’t work or only had basic Windows drivers. I spent days looking but found no drivers that worked in Windows 10. It also didn’t help that I had no working wired or wireless network hardware. That meant no Internet.

I suppose I might be able to find an early version of Windows 10 that worked on my laptop. However, it eventually would stop updating because the newer versions of Windows 10 no longer supported the hardware.

I am going back to Windows 7 Home 32-bit. At least it worked well on my laptop.

Hi,
Took me about 11 hours to go from 1909 to 21h1 since updating failed to work I haven't used it for a while
So I had to mount build by build making system images so I didn't have to start over if one failed.

Old gateway 2009 m-series laptop dual core no hyper threading core 2 duo and only 3gb memory so it was a slow one 32 bit of course works the best lol

Onboard graphic's a usually where these things hit stopping points.

Your graphics card (Geforce 4) does not have WDDM drivers, only XP drivers. So you either install Windows 7 32-bit with the XP graphics drivers (XPDM mode) or you are left with Microsoft Basic Display Adapter which has no acceleration and will make the laptop seem much slower. Assuming you don't care and want to install Windows 10 32-bit for proof of concept (to confirm it can be done), go in BIOS and disable all devices, such as LAN, wireless, audio (if there are such options). This will stop Windows Setup searching for drivers and will increase the chance of a successful installation. Once you are in Windows 10 desktop you can enable the devices one at a time and install the appropriate driver. Do not forget to have internet disabled, so you can create a local account during first startup, rather than using your Microsoft account.

Another approach would be to install Windows 7 32-bit first, download and install all drivers, disable internet and upgrade to Windows 10. Disabling internet hopefully will prevent Windows Update from replacing any working drivers. Also some old systems have incompatibility issues with recent builds (v1909 and newer). Try upgrading/installing an older Windows 10 build first, install all drivers and then upgrade to v21H1.

If you choose to install Windows 7 32-bit first, it is a good idea to update BIOS before upgrading to Windows 10 32-bit to maximize compatibility and system stability. Most manufacturers provide a Windows utility to upgrade the BIOS since laptops don't have a floppy disk drive.

MisterEd said:

Notes about my computer

• The laptop built in early or mid 2004.
• It has an early AMD Athlon 64 3400+ 2.2 GHz (Clawhammer, Socket 754). The results from CPU-Z show that it is a desktop CPU. I don’t think Mobile Athlon 64s were available until a year later.
• It has an nVidia nforce3 Go150 chipset. This is probably not as well supported in later versions of Windows like other chipsets are.
• It has a discrete nVidia GeForce4 440 Go graphics chip with 64 MB of dedicated RAM. Again OEM hardware not support by nVidia after Windows XP.

Even though some other people have managed to install Windows 10 on a computer with an AMD Athlon 64 I conclude this

• I suspect that they their computers were newer with newer versions of the Athlon 64 and newer and better supported chipsets.
• Some these computers were probably built right before or after Windows Vista was released. That meant they probably have Windows Vista drivers.
• My computer was a laptop. Laptops many times have manufacture specific drivers. Desktops tend to have more generally available hardware with better Windows support.

nVidia GeForce4 440 Go video hardware has up to DX7 (DirectX 7 support). non-compliant for Win10 as there was no "WDDM" based driver and only an XPDM based driver for that one, similar to the "no WDDM Intel 915 graphics driver for Vista" problem. the AMD Athlon 64 Clawhammer CPU, on the other hand, is ok. just maybe the nforce3 chipset and Geforce4 Go graphics hardware that are "non-compliant" for Win10 (yup, those are the show stoppers)

erpster4 said:

nVidia GeForce4 440 Go video hardware has up to DX7 (DirectX 7 support). non-compliant for Win10 as there was no "WDDM" based driver and only an XPDM based driver for that one, similar to the "no WDDM Intel 915 graphics driver for Vista" problem. the AMD Athlon 64 Clawhammer CPU, on the other hand, is ok. just maybe the nforce3 chipset and Geforce4 Go graphics hardware that are "non-compliant" for Win10 (yup, those are the show stoppers)

For Windows 7 I use the Windows XP graphics driver from HP. It doesn't work with Windows 10. Both the wired and wireless network hardware had working drivers for Windows 7. That also was not so in Windows 10.

It doesn't matter now anyways. The current version of Windows 10 blue screens during installation. Not much I can do about that.

Like I said before old laptops are dependent upon drivers from manufactures like HP. For example I have to use the Nvidia graphics driver from HP. Nvidia never did support my discrete graphics chip. If I had the same Athlon 64 CPU in a desktop system and an Nvidia graphics card chances are good that I would be able to get a driver for the graphics card. The same goes for the other hardware in the laptop.

You can run Windows 10 with Windows Vista or Windows 7 drivers. If there is no WDDM graphics driver you are stuck with Microsoft Basic Display Adapter which has no acceleration and slows the system a lot. I would try it first and probably return to Windows 7 if it would be too slow to work.

Hi all. I upgraded my 16 year Compaq Presario 1539uk desktop pc cpu from an amd 64 (single core) 3500+ to amd 64 x2 (dual core) 4400+ Made a difference to performance of win 10 (32 bit as 64 would not install). See earlier posts for full spec. Gaming is a lot better. Crysis sound no longer stutters for example. Windows 10 is now fully up to date with latest version.

spapakons said:

You can run Windows 10 with Windows Vista or Windows 7 drivers. If there is no WDDM graphics driver you are stuck with Microsoft Basic Display Adapter which has no acceleration and slows the system a lot. I would try it first and probably return to Windows 7 if it would be too slow to work.

Wow really?
I did not know that, thanks.
And it's amazing how much old machines are still capable of kicking with windows 10, respect.

dekash27 said:

Wow really?
I did not know that, thanks.
And it's amazing how much old machines are still capable of kicking with windows 10, respect.

Soon Windows 11 will be released. For the time being there is only a 64-bit version. Microsoft has put even higher specifications for Windows 11, such as Secure Boot, UEFI boot and TPM 2.0, but there are already workarounds, so any computer running Windows 10 can also run Windows 11 with the same Windows 10/8/7/Vista drivers. Follow this thread for details: Let's run Windows 11 on an incompatible hardware | Windows 11 Forum

I posted this reply from an old Lenovo ThinkPad T450, Intel i5-5300U, 8GB RAM, no UEFI, no TPM 2.0 successfully upgraded from Windows 10 Pro 64-bit to Windows 11 Pro Insider's Preview 64-bit using the hack of deleting a specific file from Windows Setup cache to bypass compatibility checks (see thread for details).