My parents had an Athlon 64 of roughly the same era running for years with Vista, then 7. It ran perfectly ok for a daily use and I still have it.

RAM is too low. 4GB would be more realistic, in a dual-channel configuration.
That's because if a Vista graphics driver is used (old hardware, WDDM 1.0), a frame buffer copy is held in RAM.
See Vista's Composition Engine or how it was called. 🤷‍♂️

Second, Hyper-Threading is really recommend from Windows XP onwards.
Two CPUs in task manager are always welcome, as far as Windows is concerned.
That way, no application can ever hog one CPU/Core for 100%. Thus, there's always a reserve left for Windows itself.

Anyway, these are just my two cents. Speaking under correction, of course. 🤷‍♂️

It will be rather slow. A SSD would make it much more pleasant and they are so cheap now. 2GB RAM is the minimum.

Windows 8.1 would probably be faster and lighter than 7. Install Classic Shell and it's like 7.

UltimateElectronic wrote on 2023-06-11, 12:52:

A mate of mine wants to put W7 x32 on his Prescott P4 (I've recommended XP) and I'm wondering if anyone has had experience with […]
Show full quote

A mate of mine wants to put W7 x32 on his Prescott P4 (I've recommended XP) and I'm wondering if anyone has had experience with this? Has anyone seen this kind of configuration run well?

Specs:
CPU: P4 3GHz (Prescott, 478, 512K, not HT)
RAM: 2GB DDR400
GPU: Radeon 9800 Pro
Mainboard: ASUS P4P800-VM (865 chipset)
Boot drive: WD800JS (SATA)

For some uses, I have an overclocked Turion s754 2.2GHz with 1MB l2 cache (its Pentium rating will be somewhere near 3600+) 2GB DDR 440, HD2400pro and SATA2 SSD.

Using this on Windows 7 x32 is simply painful (((.

PS. Once upon a time I tried to use AM3 Sempron 145(?) overclocked to 4GHz for Windows 7.
Feelings were about the same.
Alas, single-core processors are not for relatively modern operating systems - too many small but parallel computing threads

Please .. just NO!

Boot drive: WD800JS (SATA)

Switch to SSD and everything will be snappy enough.

Sure it will "run" Windows 7, but it is going to be major suckage compared to anything even remotely recent.

Years ago, I would have to work on P4 computers that were running Windows 7 and they made me want to do something similar to chewing on shards of glass because the people that had them for some reason didn't mind paying $80 to "clean them up" so they would run faster but they refused to put any money at all into upgrades.

We are talking 10-15 minutes to boot up before the systems were even useable.

And as others have said, put an SSD in there to make it not so excruciatingly painful to use for modern software / web browsing.

I would also put another 2GB RAM in there.

Wouldn't 512 KiB cache and no HyperThreading indicate a Northwood when in 3Ghz?

For years I had a Core 2 Duo laptop with 4 GB RAM and Windows 7 which was painful to use. As someone above said, it took about 15 minutes to become useful after startup. Horrible experience.

I recently upgraded it with more memory, SSD, and Windows 10 64-bit. The SSD made the biggest difference, no doubt about it. It's still slow but is now at least useable.

UltimateElectronic wrote on 2023-06-11, 12:52:

A mate of mine wants to put W7 x32 on his Prescott P4 (I've recommended XP) and I'm wondering if anyone has had experience with […]
Show full quote

A mate of mine wants to put W7 x32 on his Prescott P4 (I've recommended XP) and I'm wondering if anyone has had experience with this? Has anyone seen this kind of configuration run well?

Specs:
CPU: P4 3GHz (Prescott, 478, 512K, not HT)
RAM: 2GB DDR400
GPU: Radeon 9800 Pro
Mainboard: ASUS P4P800-VM (865 chipset)
Boot drive: WD800JS (SATA)

1) Does there exist any Prescott >= 3.0 GHz without HT?
2) The inofficial name of a Prescott is PresHOT because that CPUs eat so much power, likely 90 Watt - and when they do nothing still 50 Watt.

Conclusion
1) The machine is better for XP.
2) The machine is best for scrap. The only thing to preserve is the GPU - this one is really good.

I remember running Vista betas (which should be at least as demanding as Windows 7 RTM) on a 1.9GHz P4 Willamette with 1GB of RDRAM and ... what was that card... it was an ATI All-in-wonder but I can't remember if it was a 9700 or 9800... and, for a test system, it was fine. Would I have tried running a real complement of applications in 1GB of RAM? Probably not...

And I remember rescuing a P4 desktop, putting Windows 7 on it and selling it to a friend (otherwise a Mac user) who needed Windows for something in, oh, 2014 or so. I forget how much RAM. It was fine...ish.

But... as others have said, why would your friend want to do this? This isn't even that great an XP system, let alone a 7 system. If you go for something like a C2D/C2Q or Ivy Bridge, you can have a retro system that will absolutely scream at XP, be solid at 7, and be able to run 10 and even unsupported 11 passably. And C2D systems, at least with meh motherboards, are probably still plentiful out there. Does he need a good GPU, which limits the ability to reuse random old business desktops?

I have a Prescott 3.4GHZ + 2GB DDR2 667, Windows 7 32bit and it works great unless I use it for real world work.

As a backup machine it's great. Alas it can't go further up as the chipset is a E7320 and deosn't allow C2D.

64bit may be an option with 8GB. But I don't plan on using it connected to the internet.

The best of Microsoft vs the worst of Intel. What could go wrong

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-06-11, 20:58:

Wouldn't 512 KiB cache and no HyperThreading indicate a Northwood when in 3Ghz?

Thinking the same thing: Prescott were supposed to have 1MiB or 2MiB L2 cache.

The most similar CPU I've benchmarked is a P4 520 (84W TDP) with the same Prescott 90nm fab and HT. The result? Could barely catch up an Atom 330 1.6GHz (45nm, 8W TDP), the slowest 64-bit system that came with an MSI Wind Box DE220, which happened to have 2GB DDR400 and Win7-32 preinstalled. Sure, it could run browsers and office suites under Win7, but the experience was not pleasant at all, even with an SSD.

Prescott, the ASUS P4P800-VM, and Radeon 9800 Pro were all designed in 2003 -- six years before Windows 7 hit the market. Heck, they could make a great Win98SE build instead. If UltimateElectronic's friend needs a Win7 build then there are tons of dirt cheap used Core-i lying around.

It works, ain't great for multitasking though. 7 on 2G is actually a bit better than Vista on 2GB I have found. Vista is only just waking up at 2G whereas 7 gets going at 1.5... then oddly, the earlier releases of 10 felt as good on 1G as 7 did on 2, but the updates got a bit hefty, so not really an option now. RAM compression helps a heck of a lot on 10 though, but not so much with a more sluggish CPU. Anyhow, with how XP SP3 bloat can consume a GB of RAM, and how 7 will cruise with only half it's RAM occupied, you probably won't really lose much if anything running 7 instead of XP.... The nature of it always is though, that 7 will LET you use more demanding versions of programs, that maybe don't run on XP, then you complain it's slower than XP, when it isn't really, if you run the XP version.

Alternates for this age of hardware to modernise it, would be Rasberry Pi OS for PC, and that free version of Chrome OS.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-06-12, 03:35:

then oddly, the earlier releases of 10 felt as good on 1G as 7 did on 2, but the updates got a bit hefty, so not really an option now.

I've managed to install Win10-32 onto a Sony VAIO subnotebook with Atom N280 and 1GB DDR2. Complete "idling" costs 15% of CPU power, and any normal maneuver would skyrocket both CPU and RAM usages. It runs, but with zero usability.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-06-12, 03:35:

Alternates for this age of hardware to modernise it, would be Rasberry Pi OS for PC, and that free version of Chrome OS.

Tried the former (Debian Bullseye with Raspberry Pi Desktop) on that VAIO as well but had some serious power issues: the system shuts itself off after idling too long (15 or 30 minutes or so), probably due to power management compatibilities (ASPM?) but I couldn't find a way to get around the problem.

UltimateElectronic wrote on 2023-06-11, 12:52:

A mate of mine wants to put W7 x32 on his Prescott P4 (I've recommended XP) and I'm wondering if anyone has had experience with […]
Show full quote

A mate of mine wants to put W7 x32 on his Prescott P4 (I've recommended XP) and I'm wondering if anyone has had experience with this? Has anyone seen this kind of configuration run well?

Specs:
CPU: P4 3GHz (Prescott, 478, 512K, not HT)
RAM: 2GB DDR400
GPU: Radeon 9800 Pro
Mainboard: ASUS P4P800-VM (865 chipset)
Boot drive: WD800JS (SATA)

it would run and it would be ok with various common windows applications - but it wouldn't be up to going online or any significant multitasking, would be overwhelmed quickly

there is a big difference between whether an OS will run ok and whether applications x,y and z will run ok

Disruptor wrote on 2023-06-11, 21:42:

Conclusion
1) The machine is better for XP.
2) The machine is best for scrap. The only thing to preserve is the GPU - this one is really good.

agreed better for XP, would say same for all late 32 bit CPU. However not for scrapping unless something is actually broken