The PC's in question are a Dell Dimension 4600 (Pentium 4 2.8GHz, 80 GB HDD, 1GB RAM) and a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop (Pentium M 2GHz, 80GB HDD, 1GB RAM). Both are now running WinXP SP3 and both PCs are still in excellent condition. All RAM slots on both machines are populated and as old DDR2 RAM is quite expensive, I'd rather not invest the money to increase RAM. The only reason I'm even thinking about replacing XP with Win7 on these PCs is XP's imminent EOL and therefore becoming a major security risk - my 2 kids use these PCs mostly for MS Office apps, email and surfing the net (frequently!). My only concern here is how to make W7 SP1 run on these PCs as well as XP SP3 now does without compromising their ability to receive/install W7 updates! Any advice/tips would be appreciated.
Hi acrsn, Thanks for those tips; I will run that upgrade advisor. I already looked into replacing the RAM modules and it's way too expensive. However, your ReadyBoost tip is an excellent one as USB 2.0 flash-drive sticks are really cheap! Do you (or anyone) have any suggestions about W7's various settings and/or services that I should change in order to reduce W7's 'overhead' on these legacy machines?
The upgrade advisor indicates that the laptop should be ok. There seems to be a compatibility issue with the Dell Dimension desktop because of its Matrox G450 graphics card. Matrox support provides G450 drivers for XP and Vista, but not W7. Do you think the Vista driver might work for W7?* ------ *Edit: If that is a deal-breaker, I guess I will migrate those PCs to Linux as I know of a few distros that would provide completely support for them.
I'd say it's recommended installing Professional, as it can be activated by AutoKMS, which he already will have on the systems because of Office. Why use 2 activation solutions when 1 is enough? Pro can do anything Home can.
I will do that only if Win7 does not 'like' those old PCs (components/devices). While I'm familiar with Linux (and Lubuntu) those PCs are being used by my 2 kids who would encounter a much steeper learning curve with Linux as compared to simply migrating from XP to W7.
That can be a good occasion for your kids to learn an other system (they learn extremely fast at their age!). Viruses and adwares are virtually inexistent on Linux, think of that.
It's not just learning Linux, it's also acquiring and learning to use substitute programs for their MS Office apps ...not to mention having to deal with their existing Excel and Word files, which they still need (for school)!
Why not change out the hard drive and install win7 to that, and when you've proved it works for that one shift it to the other one and try that. You will thus not disturb your existing systems and data. And when you're satisfied you can put your existing drive in a usb drive case and copy the data over. I've got a bunch of D610s running XP/Win7Ult dual boot and one I'm presently using running Win8.1Pro. Vista drivers generally solve any problems. I get around hard drive size limitations by creating a primary partition smaller than the limit and install the boot there. The rest of the drive cannot be seen by the bios, but as soon as you boot the os it can be seen. ...T
This is what I did with a old Dell. It runs perfectly with Windows 7. Could use more ram though, other then that it is alright.
I've got Windows 7 runnng extremely well on two computers with AMD XP 3200+ Athlon single core CPUs, one with an AMD XP 3000+ Athlon single core CPU (both Athlons introduced in 2003) and on two minimum spec Netbooks. It's easy for an old computer to "like" Windows 7.
Before you commit to purchasing Windows 7, why not run an evaluation (90 day) Of Windows Thin PC. download.microsoft.com/download/C/D/7/CD789C98-6C1A-43D6-87E9-F7FDE3806950/ThinPC_110415_EVAL_x86fre.iso (copy/paste into browser) ThinPC is a small footprint version of Windows 7 designed to repurpose older hardware, based on Windows Embedded Standard 7. Digital Life Forums has a Windows Embedded section, with a lot of folks with experience: forums.mydigitallife.net/forums/45-Windows-Embedded
Or just download his full version of choice via a link provided by this forum. No need to go somewhere else and start.