I have found an old Dell inspiron laptop lying around. it is inspiron 5100 that has a P4 2.40GHZ CPU and I believe 512MB PC2100 ram, :S and a 32MB ati radeon 7500 gfx card. Do i need to install another 512MB stick ? and I read around, that my card can support it, but no aero feature, which i don't mind really. Can win 7 run on it? The latest build, 7600 13865?! And what does the Orbit's win 7 1.8 toolkit actually do? Does it make it RC and then activate or rearm?! or actually activate it?! Thanks.
i cant replace the gfx card guys! I said its a laptop!! not a desktop lool. i'll add more memory but gfx stays, since it is built right into the motherboard!
Well then buying new parts for a laptop will cost lots of money for maybe juste be able to run Seven Starter or Home Basic. Also finding drivers will be the other problem. Better to stay with XP Pro.
orbit will activate it(i just used it thinking it would activate it without adding expiry date,but it didnt) but will then have an expirary date.the rtm comes without an expirary date,however a 30 day trial.so the choice is(far as i know)is to either keep rearming it(which you can also do with orbit.can rearm it up to 3 or 4 times)or activate it but then you get the expirary date which on mine is 3/1/2010.can keep using it this way until there are other activators released soon or keys leaked.can check the expirary by-click start,in search box type winver.then click winver exe.hope this helps,have a good one.
On a strictly technical level, GFX cards inside Dell Inspiron laptops can be replaced, but it's more complicated than with a desktop. They are still "cards" that plug into a slot on the mobo, just like a desktop. However you cant just goto Dell.com and find a list of compatible upgrades for your laptop, except ram. The laptop market is all about total replacement of units every few years, imho, whereas with desktops you have room to upgrade, within the limits of your specific mobo. My last computer was a 1ghz Dell Inspiron 8000 model. Cost me $4000 new, circa 2000. Now it's ancient. I looked into replacing it's GFX card after having the unit about 5 years, but decided against it due to lack of info on compatible upgrades. I also had overheating issues with my model, so even if I found a more powerful GFX card, it would have only added to that problem. As for Orbit's toolkit - avoid such workarounds for the time being. As stated elsewhere here, you risk having a "Frankenbuild" that MS can invalidate completely with the next service pack, or even a minor patch. Using rearm should hold you until more viable options present themselves. I don't know the specific specs of your laptop, but if you have the slots for it, going above 1gig of ram would keep multitasking under Win7 alot smoother. You can tweak some of the default startup processes to streamline things, but ultimately you are not going to keep the same amount of ram usage as you currently have under Windows XP. And yes, as Lenmaer suggested, drivers may be a problem for a little while until vendors catch up to RTM code. MS probably included a generic Radeon 7500 driver in their RTM build, but it wont be as optimized as one straight from ATI. I'd download vendor Win7 drivers before actually installing Win7 on your laptop, to avoid headaches later on. My laptop had WinME preloaded, and I had to wait awhile for proper Win2k/XP drivers. That's all I can think of for now. Best of luck upgrading to Win7. --DKnight
To make it short, my though: Will you be able to install Seven -> Probably Will it run smoothly -> Probably not Woud it be better to stay with XP Pro -> Yes
I have the same laptop 5100 but I upgraded to 1GB ram. Runs 7 great. Use the beta Vista drivers and it works fine. They were an older omega set, last ones that supported 7500 mobility. Have to update from device manager but it works
just upgrade the ram. it's cheap, and the rest of the system is way more than powerful enough to run win7. people with big ridiculous systems that insist you need a 128mb video card and an insane processor just plain p*ss me off.