Let's run Win10 on really really old hardware

Fafhrd said:

128GB KingSpec 2.5-inch PATA/IDE SSD Solid State Disk (MLC Flash) SM2236 Controller: Amazon.co.uk: Computers Accessories

Not the fastest device, but still an improvement.

Thanks for that. Sadly I've got a (fairly full) 320GB spinning drive in here, so I'd need to find at least a 256GB SSD.

hennmann said:

I wish my Acer Aspire One AO533vwas easier but is a royal PITA to get to the HHD and RAM!!

My Acer Aspire 5633 which I bought in 2007 has really access to HDD and RAM. There's a little panel on the base which you can open specifically to get to the disk, for instance.
The motherboard battery... not so easy!

I am doing a clean installation and fitting an ssd in a few days as soon as SCU is out. With a 10 years old ACER laptop. I hope the hard disk is easily accessable.

actually the panel on mine is snapped in place but Acer in their infinite wisdom felt using a plastic knife with the teeth removed or a thin guitar pick to release the snap tabs or latches and remove the keyboard and careful don't damage the delicate wiring to this keyboard!! Then there are 6 screws going through the motherboard who's only purpose is to prevent the bottom panel from being removed. Next carefully flip this mess upside down and figure out how to remove the bottom panel??? Did I remove enough/all the screws?? Yes I did because there are tabs or fingers on one end and little rat claws or snap latches on the other so why do we need this stupid pre removal procedure?? I saw videos on Youtube fore both models and seems to me all of your screws are accessible from the bottom? If you wan't to cringe watch the one for the AO533 with the chick demonstrating and this is for the RAM.. Now for another story on Acer logic there seemed to be a mystery on what flavor of RAM is required so instead of rip and tear just to find out I tried to order a 2 gb from Asser and the banana in the parts department would only sell me a 1 gb "because that is what it was sold new with" WTF was my feeling on this or in other words lets perpetuate lousy performance of struggling with crappy Win 7 which is a resource pig like Vista!! That kind of logic from Asser dictates the fool trying to sell me another 1gb of ram should be a politician of which all they do is lie cheat and steal from the tax payer! I was going to purchase an earlier model that came with either Linpus Lite Linux or XP but as usual I procrastinated tooooo long and both were discontinued and Win 7 Starter oink was now my option with the perpetual blue circle of sloth as I call it because it is struggling with a Win pig and 1 gb of RAM. Otherwise the previous models soared like eagles compared to circling like a vulture with Win 7. Unfortunately with Linpus, Acer would only give an 8 GB ssd instead of 150 or 250 which is another WTF. Some complained about the Linpus but other than the simple Icons for the full GUI version many didnt realize a small icon on the bottom taskbar allowed you to toggle back and forth between full gui or a traditional Linux desktop. Instead of the stupid blue circle of sloth they should have kept the hour glass but instead had it red like the red hour glass on the belly of a Black Widow Spider! Now we have Win 10 with much running in the background or the CPU detector that condemns perfectly usable CPU's but wait! Linux doesn't do this and anti virus crap isn't needed! This is my rant for today because it is surprising how many are still running 7 and I clung to XP til the bitter end! I hated Linux because of the CLI but it is getting to the point of Windoze dictating to the user what Windoze wants instead of listening to the cries for mercy from the customers and now more and more are using NLite to decrapafy win 10 to remove stuff they do not want! I wanted to give Win10S a try but again I had to cut through tooooo much red tape to get it including Microsoft puppets on the phone or live chat that didn't even know what 10S is?? Another WTF and unless one tries it, one doesn't know is the "S"stands for slim/stripped or sloth/$h!t.

hennmann said:

It's great to see this thread is still up and running. Some chirp about socket versions being confusing but in most cases this saves confusion and creates accuracy. My old now ancient hardware attempts were first on my crappy MSI K8T Neo2-F socket 939 that when I purchased new had a 3500+ and 2 years ago I purchased a used 4800+x2 and both have 2001 as a date on them. Also this lousy board only supports AGP not PCIe so it still has I believe is an FX5700LE? card that I purchased new with the board in 2004. Also I'm running the max RAM which is 4GB DDR 400 PC3200 and Win 10 64 would refuse to install, grrrrrrrrr! Okay next I tried Win10 32 and this installed but seems to me drivers for the AGP were a problem and perhaps for the K8T as well. Performance was often buggy and unstable so I got fed up and ripped Win10 out by the roots! This setup flies like an eagle on XP32/64 and is very snappy and stable once I spent $7 on ePain and purchased Win7 32/64 Ult and downloaded directly from Mic instead of using a slipstreamed $h!t copy from xxxxxx xxx. Next after reading previous posts on this thread about "if it runs Win7 32 it will run Win10 32. Nope nope and nope!! I attempted to run Win 10 on a Dull Dementia 4600 with a socket 478 2.8 GHz THAT supports NX but the motherboard BIOS does not. A hacked BIOS software would be required and I didn't bother with this. This Dull was running Win7 Ult 32 and even with 4GB of RAM was a bit demanding on this 478 so I ripped it out and installed Win7 Starter. This was originally a Win XP machine but surprisingly runs perfect and fast with IDenebe 10.5 but gave up on that as well due to all of the patch nonsense just to use Crapple! Now for lower end hardware and even though this isn't overly old I have an Acer Aspire One AO533 2009 running an Atombomb N455 1.66 GHz with the RAM maxed out from 1 to 2 GB. It has Win7 Starter on it and recently I upgraded the 250GB HHD to a WD 3D NAND 1TB and this really helped!! After reading the specs on RAM I discovered this little Abomb is 64bit so I figured lets partition the SSD and dual boot Starter and Win10 Pro64. The graphics are sharper than 7 and 10 started out as Home32 through the upgrade option but since I purchased Win10 32/64 that gave the option of Home, Pro, Education I decided to try Pro 64 and yes it is very stable and usable but is a sloth with all of the bloat ware running in the background. Logically Win10S would be nice to try but seems to be tooooooooo big of a hassle to obtain!

The old computer with MSI K8T Neo2-F socket 939 motherboard should run Windows 10 32-bit fine. Unless you install proper WDDM graphics drivers, Windows 10 use Microsoft Basic Display Adapter which is software-only and make the old computer look 5 times slower! If your card is indeed NVidia FX 5700, then you can use the official NVidia Vista 32-bit drivers on it which are WDDM 1.0 and will enable hardware acceleration, so the computer should be almost as fast as running Windows XP. The same is true for your other systems. Do not hurry to judge a computer as slow unless you have first installed all the available drivers with graphics being the most important. In an old system Windows will most likely automatically find all drivers (excluding the graphics where it just uses Microsoft Basic Display Adapter). You must download and install at least the chipset and graphics drivers before you test the performance. And as we have said many times, they don't have to be specifically for Windows 10. You can install Windows 8 or 7 or Vista 32-bit drivers and in some rare cases even Windows XP drivers (not for graphics of course).

spapakons said:

The old computer with MSI K8T Neo2-F socket 939 motherboard should run Windows 10 32-bit fine. Unless you install proper WDDM graphics drivers, Windows 10 use Microsoft Basic Display Adapter which is software-only and make the old computer look 5 times slower! If your card is indeed NVidia FX 5700, then you can use the official NVidia Vista 32-bit drivers on it which are WDDM 1.0 and will enable hardware acceleration, so the computer should be almost as fast as running Windows XP. The same is true for your other systems. Do not hurry to judge a computer as slow unless you have first installed all the available drivers with graphics being the most important. In an old system Windows will most likely automatically find all drivers (excluding the graphics where it just uses Microsoft Basic Display Adapter). You must download and install at least the chipset and graphics drivers before you test the performance. And as we have said many times, they don't have to be specifically for Windows 10. You can install Windows 8 or 7 or Vista 32-bit drivers and in some rare cases even Windows XP drivers (not for graphics of course).

Windows 10 32 bit is quite usable on my old 3GB RAm Socket 939 PC. I did install a cheap SSD which made a huge difference. See Windows 10 on 2004 PC?
Don't waste your time trying to install 64 bit Windows!

An SSD will make any computer ten times faster as it shortens disk access time. All computers when out of primary storage (RAM) they use secondary storage (virtual RAM in hard disk). Old computers are almost always short of RAM and they have too frequent disk access making them very slow. An SSD will make disk access at least 10 times faster, comparable to the speed of RAM and make the old computer look like new again! And their prices are reasonable, about 45-50€ for 120GB (you shouldn't need more for an old computer, use a second mechanical disk for data). The best combination is to maximize RAM (fill all slots) and install an SSD.

spapakons said:

And their prices are reasonable, about 45-50€ for 120GB (you shouldn't need more for an old computer, use a second mechanical disk for data).

Using SSD+mechanical disk isn't an option for my laptop (and I suspect most laptops) as there isn't a drive bay with space for anything else in addition to a 2.5 inch spinning disk drive.