I just sold a P2/500 with 256MB of RAM to a guy on a local site. The night before I put WinXP on and the video/sound drivers just to see if everything worked. It was fine! It installed in about as much time as XP usually takes (the HDD slowed it down more than anything) and I played NFS3 on it for a good couple hours for which it was more than up to the task. I also have a totally barebones XP setup on my EeePC 2G Surf which is a gimped Celeron 570MHz (6x95) w/no L2 cache. XP is 15 years old now, it's fine on some surprisingly low-end hardware if you don't choke it down with virus scanners, Adobe products, and crapware.

I've run "fully modern" Linux distros on older stuff - Debian 8 on a PowerMac G5 and ElementaryOS on my dual (P4)Xeon - but those are 2GHz+ dual-CPU machines with multiple gigabytes of RAM. Been meaning to get Linux going on my 450MHz G4 but it'll be a pretty lightweight / older distro if I do.

agent_x007 wrote:

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...

with the bypass for NXbit I've seen people running win8 on northwoods

I'm not sure which is the oldest CPU with support on win8/10, but the sempron I used didn't need any bypass, it was a s754 Sempron based on the Athlon 64Venice core (64bit capable), it's from 2005 I think, if it had more ram I'm sure it would be usable

Officially (ie. no mod required), oldest from Intel with Win 8 x86 support is this : LINK (released November 14, 2004)

Yeah, Socket 754 means it's based on Athlon 64, so it should support both SSE2 and NX-bit.

You're supposed to run Windows FFLP when you want a newer os on a 9x machine.

Otherwise standard xp is a cpu/ram hog constantly running services and programs that non daily internet machines dont need. Drives me nuts when people just their standard copy of xp home/pro and just leave all that junk running in the background.

I got a few I've pushed to there limits...

First computer that I could call my own back in 2005 used it till 2008 (I know that's horrible):
Gateway g6-333 (I think that was the model)
CPU: 333MHz Celeron
RAM: 192MB PC-100
Video: some Integrated 4MB ATI witch in 2006 got upgraded to a v3 3000 i got for free, thank god cause the onboard sucked
HDD: 2x20GB one for OS
ODD: standard CD-ROM
OS: Windows XP Pro SP3 tweaked as much as possible (it wasn't all that bad)

Here is my first laptop i used in that same time frame 05-08
Some dell inspiron
CPU: 300MHz pentium II
Video: cant remember but it was 4MB and could be expanded to 8MB
RAM: 128MB PC-100
HDD: 8GB
ODD: standard DVD-ROM
OS: Windows XP Pro SP3

Here's one just for the hell of it I did awhile back:
Dell Optiplex GX1
CPU: 1.4GHz celeron W/powerleap adapter
RAM: 768MB PC-100
Video: Nvidia 5500 256MB PCI
ODD: DVD combo burner drive
SSD: 120GB SSD
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 32 Bit
All drivers installed it wasn't that bad, just stay away from heavy websites and I also had to use a usb sound card for audio to work.

Living wrote:

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.

Well I have other cards I can use in it, since its AGP 4X universal I could use my 7600GS AGP with the Windows 7 Beta Driver for Geforce 7 which works on 10.

you better do that since win 8, 8.1 and 10 relies 100% on the VGA to do all the work for the UI

candle_86 wrote:

Well I have other cards I can use in it, since its AGP 4X universal I could use my 7600GS AGP with the Windows 7 Beta Driver for Geforce 7 which works on 10.

Why use beta driver, when you have official Windows 8 x86/x64 driver for GF 6000/7000 series ?
x86 : LINK
x64 : LINK

I used the 6100 IGP on WIndows 10 without any problems, they say it's not supported, but if you download the win 8 driver from the Nvidia website it works fine on win 10 (and also 8.1)

on a similar note my 9500PRO didn't like win 7, with the default driver all is good, D3D seems to work fine (including Aero), but it lacks OGL and control panel, installing the vista drivers, it seems to work, until I reboot and it loads the driver with everything corrupted, I tried a few times with the same result, the same PC with the same driver version on win XP works 100% fine... really odd.

Once I tried to install Windows 10 on my Thinkpad R60 before I upgraded it (Contained an ancient Intel Core Solo processor and 1gb of ram). The operating system would freeze just trying to open the start up button, Windows 7 ran okay. The system ran fine with XP (Still had to use caution, especially with web browsing because it was so resource hungry), Windows 2000 w/ Blackwingcat's kernel extensions wasn't very stable and was still recourse hungry like its younger brother xp. LXLE Linux was probably the best choice overall. Video playback was OK at 360p.

I didn't even try to install Windows vista or later on my Dell Latitude D600, its processor was barely weaker than my Thinkpad R60's before I upgraded it and currently has the same amount of same (1gb). My Dell Latitude D600 is super unstable with Windows 98 despite installing all the drivers (If you haven't read my topic of doing so). It ran well with Windows 2000, the D600 seems very problematic in general though. In XP, the broadcom wireless driver made the os crash when I shut it down because of a sys file. If I deleted the file, xp wouldn't crash but then I lost the ability to connect to wireless. I'm gonna try dual booting 98 with Puppy Linux in the future.

Played around a bit with my grandmother's low end HP 2000-2d49wm laptop from 2011. Boy, that thing was SUPER SLOW! My Dell Latitude D600 is faster!!! HP literally forced Windows 7 on that thing and used gave it 4gb of ram just so it wouldn't look bad. CPU usage was 50% idle on Windows 7! Windows 7 had issues after reinstalling it; aero refused to work despite having the driver installed. The official dell site mentioned no support of
Vista or XP, but those two worked. Windows Vista overall preformed better than 7 and its aero actually worked. Mint Linux was a bit sluggish, but solid. Windows XP gave the CPU a massive break; CPU idle was 3% on average. Despite that, web browsing and such were still sluggish on the system. The oddest thing about the laptop is the fact it ran minecraft at 20fps at completely lowest settings, about the same amount my Dell Latitude e4310 laptop with an i5 CPU. In the end, since I had too many laptops I donated it to a local church w/ Windows XP.