Would it run on a 2.13ghz pentium 4 processor, 2gb ram, 100gb 7200rpm hard drive, 256mb video card that currently has XP? I'd have to buy the home version of 7 for $200, correct?

 

Actually Altair, you'd be quite surprised by how well the upgrade feature has been improved on the new version of Windows. I was quite surprised myself. All of us in the office did an upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Ultimate, and other than a select few pieces of software (network stuff mostly) it was seamless. Took about 90 min or so....but it kept everything installed.

I had to do a full upgrade at home because I was running Windows XP, and its still 10 times faster than my XP box (not literally, but much faster in general).

However, there are NO upgrade paths for the RC's, so if you have it loaded, you have to do a fresh install outright....

 

I'll be honest, I think that processor is probably not going to like Windows 7, but based on the specs, I would say it should work...

The issue here for you isnt going to be the OS, but driver availability.

 

That's refreshing to hear, honestly for me a clean install is just as easy plus I've always preferred it. Took me roughly 30 minutes to do a clean install of 7 on a separate partition, I've been running almost exclusively on the RC for the past few days. So far I approve, they've fixed a lot of their transgressions.

 

Will it run well? No. Will it run? Probably.

I had the RC on a 5 year old Dell XPS laptop at my old second job before I quit it. It had a Pentium M, a cousin of the Pentium 4 made with laptops in mind, at about 1.6 GHz or so, and I upgraded it to 2GB of RAM. Only part that suffered was the graphics, it'd sometimes have some errors, as all it had was integrated video. If you have a dedicated card and dedicated memory, which it looks like you do, that'd be better.

Personally, I'd save up and buy/build a new PC with Windows 7 on it rather than trying to put a brand new OS on a system that old.

As far as drivers go, Windows 7 is much better than Vista (which was much better than XP) about default "generic" drivers. They may not work the best, but they usually work.

 

i just finished installing windows 7 64 bit on my brand new hd on my laptop and even comparing it to the RC and the Beta before that windows 7 is an amazing OS, microsoft definetly did a good job on it IMO

 

I am going to give windows 7 a shot some weekend since I get it through msdnaa. My only fear is something going sour and not having my restore cd's near by to bring it back to vista if I need to since I absolutely need my laptop for classes during the week. My other hold back is I am in deparate need to get a larger hdd for my laptop. Maybe I will look today

Here is a question for you techy guys. I have a Dell D830. I already put 4gb of ram in it last year. Which version of 7 should i install? 32 or 64 bit? Vista 32bit comes on it, but even if I do 64 bit am I gaining anything with only 4gb ram?


Edit, just read Sharps post about ultimate RC. Think I'll wait till they post the RTM.

Edit 2, I have ultimate vista, but... compairing pro to ultimate win 7, I think pro would be just find since it is available on msdnaa

 

Um, someone correct me if I'm wrong here..... If you have a 32(86) bit system, then installing a 64bit OS wont work.

 

Windows 7 Ultimate is available via MSDN, I know, I'm running it.

As for your D830, I'd run 32bit. Why? More of the Vista drivers will work than the 64bit, if any, and there aren't many you will need anyhow.

The upside to Windows 7 is if a program is incompatible, you can run it in a compatibility mode from previous Windows versions.

 

Older systems yes, most of the newer Core 2 Duo chipsets and up are all 32/64 bit capable..