I installed Windows 7 Starter on a friends laptop with only 512mb. It was running fine after imnstall until I installed Norton's and it started hitting the pagefile for everything and dog slow. Well, over the weekend I installed Windows HP on my sister's old eMachine single core AM2 system with 1gb and ran out of memory as well. I upgraded her system to an Intel i3-540 system with 4GB. I have her AM2 motherboard and decided to install windows starter for kicks and it runs flawlessly with 1GB RAM. It's only using 450MB with MSE for security software. I've been reading about it for a while to find the cons of it, but they are old and most features have been enabled or easy to work around or not missed. How usable is Windows 7 Starter? I read only 3 apps can run at one time and I've had a dozen programs at once already. Screen resolution was suppose to be low res only, but 1080P works on my 1080p monitor just fine. No DVD support, as there is no media center (I can live without this feature). I have no DVD installed yet as it's on my bench and installed with a USB Flash Drive. I have Nero 9 Essentials, VL and other 3rd party software to replace media center if needed. MSE and Windows Live is not picked up by Windows Update, but I manually downloaded SE with no problems and I don't use Windows Live. I haven't tried a game yet. With only 1GB I may be very limited, but this machine will be for email, photo's, video streaming, internet stuff only anyways. are there any other features that are not suppose to work? If I can get games to work and my own 3rd party DVD stuff to work, then this may replace win 7 Ult. This only has 30 programs running in task manager and approx 450MB being used. compared to 50 programs and 1.17GB windows 7 ult. uses. Let me know what your experiences have been. -=Mark=-
You have a LOT of erroneous information there! There is a reason why the minimum system requirements for Windows 7 is 1GB of memory. Running Windows 7, any version (including Starter) on only 512MB of RAM is a really really bad idea and you found out why. The 3 application limit only applies to Vista Starter, not 7 Starter. No Windows 7 version picks up MSE or Windows Live until you switch Windows Update to get updates for all Microsoft products. Unfortunately the check box for it in the Windows Update settings doesn't appear until you install something that enables it. Downloading and installing Silverlight allows you to easily enable this for example. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Windows 7 Starter. It works very well and has only minor things disabled that in all honesty make it run better on lesser hardware. It really comes down to this: you get no Aero features, can't change the background, and don't have Windows Media Center. It is not a stripped down or crippled version. Everything works just fine on it.