Thinking about installing Windows 7 on this 5 year old laptop. Here are the specs: Intel Celeron M 1.5GHz 512MB Memory 40Gb hard drive 14" screen Which Windows 7 edition i Should Install?
If you had more memory i would suggest Home Premium but with those specs, anything more then Win 7 Starter you might have issues.Although you could try Something higher then Win 7 Starter and if it does not run as well as you like you can always just wipe and reinstall a diff version.
I would suggest Windows Foundamentals for Legacy PC. It's XP-SP2 based (upgradable to SP3) but tweaked a lot for maximum speed on elder PC. It's an official MS build (so not an "hacked" version). In a pc like yours it could be super-fast and responsive. The minimum requirements for this speedy-OS is a 233 MHz, 32MB Ram and 600MB HD Space. Give it a try. Win7 could be slow on that laptop... doesn't make sense to have a nicer GUI if the OS itself is slow and unusable.