Windows 7 Home Basic vs. XP Pro on 256 MB RAM Hello, my second laptop is an old FSC with a Pentium III M 1.0 GHz and only 256 MB of RAM. Unfortunately more RAM is not supported. It works under XP Pro SP3 for many years, but now I want to do a clean install, either with XP Pro again, or with Win 7 Home Basic. Will Win 7 install on 256 MB RAM? What would you recommend? Thanks
@ urie Well, I am not interested in the official minimum specs, I would like to read something about the unofficial ones. I am not sure if Win 7 Home Basic would really use more RAM than XP Pro.
First it will work if you set Win7 to use Classic Theme. Note Aero is resource intensive for antique laptops. You won't see much difference why? Because Win7 is optimized for Multi cores meaning it will run faster on Dual Core Machines than Vista and Xp BUT the antiques you own is single core...
Stick with XP. While "minimum requirements" aren't a reliable indicator if a system is supported or not, your system is more than likely not. According to the last report that I read Windows 7 installer simply crashed when attempting to install it on a system with 256 mb but worked on one with 384 mb. In addition, while Windows 7 manages to gain performance on high end hardware by taking advantage of modern technology it is significantly slower on low-end hardware than XP.
It is safe to say that Win7 will work rather well on Pentium 4 with HT. Pentium 3 is rather obselete.
No action regarding Aero would be required, it will either work or not and since the graphics card is doing most of the work it really isn't that "resource intensive". Old mobile graphics cards will simply not be supported, Aero would not be enabled, even if one would manage to find drivers for the card (a problem with mobile hardware in general). And the optimizations in NT 6.x go far beyond multicore support ... As it stands it would be more than unlikely if the op even managed to successfully install Windows 7 let alone making it usable ...
Aero is not included in Home Basic, so we can stop talking about that. I do not expect Win 7 to be faster than XP, but I would like to have some new features like (joining) HomeGroup, etc.
Well if you are not interested why even post the question i can tell you rite now it wont even install on your machine.
You can join an existing HomeGroup, you just cannot create a new one with Home Basic. @ urie OK, if you know for sure that it won't install, then thank you for this information. I will ignore the first part of your answer.
Just stick with XP. Windows 7 is definitely better than XP but its benefits are designed to run with more RAM. XP still provides networking and workgroups etc, just not the homegroup function which is only really a nicety, the majority of users that use networked computers would most likely just stick to regular networking (which in reality, provide no real disadvantages over the homegroup sharing)... For Windows 7 you'd have to trim down all the services as well, but on 256MB I'd recommend the same done with XP.
OK, thank you all, I think I will stay with XP on this machine. Next problem with 7 would be finding compatible drivers, I guess.