Win7 ran okay on my p3 933 and Tualatin 1400, but had absolutely no drivers for... anything, so I never bothered following up on it.

I once tried to run a modern lightweight linux distro on a Dell Dimension 4100 with a P3-933 and 512MB. It was unusably slow. But it runs Win98SE like a bat out of hell. 😀

I recall one of my middle school teachers was running WinXP on their ThinkPad 380XD. That's a 233MHz PMMX, with the stock 32MB memory and 4GB HDD.

Needless to say, it was sloooooow.

Also, my high school computer programming teacher installed Win7 on their old ~700MHz PIII desktop as an experiment, but I don't remember that being quite as miserable to use as the ThinkPad was.

The slowest PCs at my current school are some Lenovo ThinkCentres with Win10 Pro on them in the library and a few computer labs, they've got like 2.30 GHz Pentiums and 3 GB of RAM in them. They're pretty slow, but not nearly as bad as that ThinkPad sounds 🤣

cj_reha wrote:

Oh yeah, the original PSU died also, and I replaced it a few years ago with the only one I had on hand, a crappy Bestec HP OEM PSU that works, but I'd like to replace it soon.

As long as the Bestec isn't the 250W mobo killer, it should be okay.

If you can find a Delta unit though, definitely do the switch 😀

gdjacobs wrote:

cj_reha wrote:

Oh yeah, the original PSU died also, and I replaced it a few years ago with the only one I had on hand, a crappy Bestec HP OEM PSU that works, but I'd like to replace it soon.

As long as the Bestec isn't the 250W mobo killer, it should be okay.

If you can find a Delta unit though, definitely do the switch 😀

That's...exactly what it is. 🤣 🤣

Gonna look through my PSU stack right now lmao

Quickly replaced with 170watt Newton Power. Runs stable, tested to work. Thanks for the save 🤣

I remember trying win XP with a sis 530 board (those PC Chips ones) and it was a really terrible, NT 4.0 works well in it, and so does 98, but XP... feels like there is something really wrong, when I tested XP with the same kind of CPU and some newer VIA chipset compaq board it was a lot less bad.

Your mileage may vary, but it might be of interest to try to "Trim the Fat" -- on something modern. I've personally seen an nLited (I think there is an NTlite now for 7+ too) version of XP/2000 cut down to be workable in 16MB of RAM. If your ambitions are noble, you could slim it down to around a dozen bare-bones processes and an install size of around ~100MB. I wouldn't recommend that for anything serious though. Practically every piece of useful software is going to missing some sort of dependent library or API.

Modern Linux derivatives are for the most part out of the question unless you have easy RAM expansion above 64MB. From my personal experience, you're not going to be getting any recent OS to boot, even with something like iceWM or the complete deprecation of X as that's not the problem. Instead I've learned the Kernel itself (Mainline Debian) usually won't even fit with anything less than ~90MB of RAM.

You might have better luck getting NetBSD running than Linux, and it's modern enough. I'm gonna give that a shot here soon.

I ran Windows 10 x64 on AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 and Pentium Extreme Edition 965 (both were overclocked and had 8GB's of RAM for "best case scenario").
They are two of the oldest CPU's that can run Win 10 x64 natively, so... do they count as "Low Spec" for Windows 10 x64 ?

Proof :
Athlon 64 FX-62 : LINK
Pentium Extreme Edition 965 : LINK

I had Win10 running on my Pentium M system not too long ago. Other than Win10 generally being a shitty operating system, it actually ran quite well! It was running on a PM-755 overclocked to 2.72GHz with 2GB DDR2, 256GB SSD, and a GTX560 video card. It's back on Win7 now, which I've always found to be faster and a helluva lot more stable than 10.

Back in the day I ran XP on my P2-300 and P233MMX, with around 192MB of RAM.

don't try Windows 8.1 with 512MB (actually less considering the IGP used something), I had that with a s754 Sempron, not fun, I think it's worse than XP with 64MB (had that on a Celeron once, thought I would upgrade it from ME to XP, not the best idea);
Windows 10 I used it well on a A64 X2, the problem with it is that it loves to update and run "telemetry" services, which when you don't have much CPU, memory and fast storage is really a pain, windows 7 is a lot nicer for old PCs because you can easily disable updates and so on.
windows 7 on a Northwood P4 looked OK.

Back in 2007 I tried Vista on a system it was never intended to be on, it was painful.

AMD Duron 1.2
512mb PC2100
Geforce2 MX200 PCI
20gb 5400RPM Quatum Bigfoot

Sufice to say it was slow 🤣

Oh yeah, until 2014 I used an eMachines desktop with an AMD X2 4050e and 3 gb of ram in it. Painfully slow even for its own time 🤣

This now makes me want to pop in a spare 80gb IDE drive onto my FICAZ11E with 1gb of ram and my Athlon 1200 and install Windows 10 32bit with a Riva TNT M64

candle_86 wrote:

This now makes me want to pop in a spare 80gb IDE drive onto my FICAZ11E with 1gb of ram and my Athlon 1200 and install Windows 10 32bit with a Riva TNT M64

Win10/MS-DOS dual boot FTW!

Aren't NX-bit AND SSE2 support required for ALL versions of Win 8/Win 10 (ie. Athlon64/Prescott only) ?
Source : LINK

I guess you COULD bypass that with command before installation, but it's risky...

candle_86 wrote:

This now makes me want to pop in a spare 80gb IDE drive onto my FICAZ11E with 1gb of ram and my Athlon 1200 and install Windows 10 32bit with a Riva TNT M64

last Monday i tried this in my Asus EEEPC 900 (Celeron M 900Mhz, 32GB SSD, 2GB Ram), it works okay but there is no VGA driver for the Intel 910/915, the ones for win xp dont work in win 10 (it works in win 7 and vista), so im stuck with the generic driver of windows witch does slowdown the netbook.