Installing Windows 10 On A 7-Year-Old Laptop

[Deleted member 184142]

He's probably one of those people who whine and refuse to upgrade to 8 which has been out for nearly 3 years but still whine about bloaty Vista/7. For me Vista to 8 was a huge difference on dual core and spindle drive.

I have had Vista on my parents dual core, with 2GB, lowend HW even for the time I built it. No issue with Vista, as I made sure to use HW that made Vista drivers, rather than all the stupid people who tried to install Vista on HW that the MFGs refused to make proper drivers for, than blame it on the OS. After some time, I was able to get a free copy of Win7, installed that, ran just as good but with some things cleaned up, then sometime later got a really good deal on Win8.1 and installed that on it and it ran even better. Funny enough, the HDD crashed (it was past its time anyway), and installed linux as a patch to get it back running, as I could not find the OS key, and it was slower than Win8.1, big time on bootup, not that it was bad, but I could feel it lost a good bit of "snap" in the change, all the phone calls from the parents on how to use it motivated me to search and find the OS key and reinstall Win8.1, and it is still in use today.

People sing the glory of what was XP, yet every OS upgrade I have done since then has been a large improvement...

I agree about hating the GUI on Win8, but 5 bucks for a start menu is nothing and I more or less have the OS I want. I don't know what Win10 will bring, as I have not used it yet, but I am hopeful, I am not going to bitch about SaaS, even though I don't like it, I do see the plus side, as keeping everything up to date and patched means less infections and less infections means less to spread, less botnets etc etc. However, this does mean the odd quick 60 bucks I make in 10mins will probably go out the window for disinfecting computers.

 

[Elios]

My parents are STILL rocking that exact laptop. It actually runs (windows 7 starter) pretty decently for basic web browsing etc as long as you don't load it up with tabs.

I've seriously thought about throwing a $50 SSD and a 1GB of RAM upgrade in it, probably be just fine!

did that for a friends netbook worked great SSD even got a bit more battery life out of it

 

[defaultluser]

did that for a friends netbook worked great SSD even got a bit more battery life out of it

Not worth it for the single core version. Thing is just so processor-limited, even an SSD is barely noticeable. I tried this on my old n270 Asus Eee, and the SSD made less of an improvement than the 2GB ram upgrade did.

You also don't have to open up the case with a budger to install ram, but you do if you want to install an SSD.

 

[GotNoRice]

Anything that at least has Vista drivers available for it should be able to work with Windows 10. The drivers between Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 are all very similar.

Most importantly, vista is when Microsoft began to require that manufacturers supply BOTH 32-bit AND 64-bit drivers for their hardware, even if 32-bit was still king at that point. By the time 7 rolled around, just about everything already had great 64-bit drivers. Most of those will still work today on Windows 10 x64 if there is nothing newer available.

 

[Tostie]

I put windows 10 on a 2007 dell inspiron 1420. Took awhile to get the right drivers for audio and wireless but works fine.

Which specific driver did you have to install to get the audio on the 1420 working? I've tried doing the SigmaTec audio driver from the Dell drivers page, and ran it under Vista compatibility, but I continue to get the Error message during the install.

 

[Ponder]

So many people got caught up on the Windows 8 UI problems that many didn't realize a lot of what was good about Windows 8.x. It's ability to run well on low end hardware got missed.

It was not missed. That is what made windows 8 such a disappointment. The forced UI change forced one to decide between a leaner OS or UI. IF they had not forced the UI change, allowed choice of UI, it would have been their best OS to date... from a sales stand point. Then make extra money on the back-end selling apps and media.

Now it is about 3 years later...




.

 

[CreepyUncleGoogle]

Not worth it for the single core version. Thing is just so processor-limited, even an SSD is barely noticeable. I tried this on my old n270 Asus Eee, and the SSD made less of an improvement than the 2GB ram upgrade did.

You also don't have to open up the case with a budger to install ram, but you do if you want to install an SSD.

People vastly overestimate the performance increase that SSDs offer. Even hardware sites like Anandtech have been on that whole infatuation with SSD thing-y for a long time. I installed one in my Asus 1005HAB Eee and it made literally no difference at all. Sure that's processor limited to a big extent, but even an n270 should be fast enough to see some sort of performance difference.

Then there's boot up times that people brag about being so much better with SSDs. On my junky Dell Latitude e6320 with a 7200 RPM 320GB hard drive, it takes less than 20 seconds to get to a login screen. A SSD would improve that by like 3-5 seconds (know because I tried). So what? The system is not that much more responsive or amazing. It's yet another example of the vast exaggerations people make about SSD performance improvements.

Yup, they're a lot more drop-proof and they use a little less power so you get a few more minutes of battery life, but there's no reason to go gutting every computer you own that has a perfectly good hard drive in it to replace them all with SSDs. It's better to just pick them up as you replace entire laptops.