You can use "Defer Upgrade" for a period (at least 6 months as I did with TH2/1511, finally giving in when I'm ready) if you want. I forgot if it's available in Home too or just in Pro. The flexibility is much better on Pro though, where you can edit Group Policy options easily.

Updated tip: Get Windows 8 (not 8.1) Pro OEM key and then upgrade for free before July ends.
As I understand from their own words, this one would be the perfectly legal way as far licensing is concerned:
https://www.microsoft.com/OEM/en/licensing/sb … bid=fxBv0yYqKnr

Especially recommended if you have a new machine or an older machine with Vista or a not so old XP rig. Even cheap Core 2 chips will make good use of it, provided you have enough RAM and especially with an SSD. 😉 And IF you're not so paranoid about the Big Brother watching you. 🤣

if you check the driver it's actually WDDM 1.0
it's basically a Vista driver, they've made win7-8-10 to be compatible with vista drivers basically.

for what I was trying to use my GMA 950 I had better luck with Linux (OGL 1.4 emulator) than Win10

oh and when I tested my Geforce 6100 on win10 it also worked fine, but I had to download the win8 drivers from the Nvidia website, while the Intel IGP downloaded automatically via windows update, but it all worked (including control panel) on the 6100.

unlike my HD 4670 which doesn't get a working control panel on 10... (but the driver is installed via win update like the GMA 950)

Only 5 days left of the free upgrade and so many computers and motherboards not yet activated 😵
Have a lot of old yet somewhat capable laptops that i want to upgrade. The oldest that to my suprise could take Windows 10 x86 was a 915PM based HP nx8220 with a Pentium M 750 and Radeon x600 graphics. I think this also can take Windows 98 SE, so would be cool to have dualboot on that 😊

It doesn't really surprise me, the Core 2 Duo is still a very capable processor and you have 4 GB of memory which is lots for such a machine.

I remember bargain notebooks back in the day, sold with single core Celeron, 512 MB of RAM and Windows Vista. Now THAT was slow 😀

Anything C2D will run Win10 great. Basically, if it runs Win7 good, it will run Win10 better, and C2D loved Win7. I remember back when 10 first came out, I did see a few compatibility issues (like some Win7 laptop trackpads not having Win10 drivers, and some USB webcams not having Win10 drivers), but I'd hope that by now MS have come up with a Win10 driver for everything under the sun.

clueless1 wrote:

Anything C2D will run Win10 great. Basically, if it runs Win7 good, it will run Win10 better, and C2D loved Win7. I remember back when 10 first came out, I did see a few compatibility issues (like some Win7 laptop trackpads not having Win10 drivers, and some USB webcams not having Win10 drivers), but I'd hope that by now MS have come up with a Win10 driver for everything under the sun.

My experience is that Win7 drivers often can be used for Win10. I suspect if a certain amount of drivers are installed for a device and works without issues they somewhat get approved by MS and become available by Windows Update. At work we had 100+ HP nx6125 we had to use HP Vista drivers for then we deployed Win7. No drivers available from MS, but somewhat later almost all theese drivers were available from Windows Update!?. From HP no official Win7 drivers were ever released.

Yeah, I have two Core 2 Duo PCs that I refurbished that I put Windows 10 clean install on. They both have 4GB of DDR3 memory and run pretty well. I even Validated them.

I was also impressed to see the 32bit edition of Win10 kind of fly on my father's ASRock 775Dual-VSTA with a Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.83ghz), 2GB of DDR2-533 and a GeForce G210 (albeit it took a few hacks to get it to work, namely the PCI Express root port fix and fastboot disable). At least for everyday usage and casual web browsing it's perfectly usable; a lot faster than I actually expected it to be. As for the drivers, even Vista-era drivers can be used sometimes with a bit of tinkering such as bypassing driver signing and other tricks. For example, I got a really old hp scanjet (2005?) to work on this very machine, a UAD-1e DSP card and a Focusrite LiquidMix/32 on my Win10x64 studio PC, etc.

I've got an Athlon 64 X2 AM2 machine with 4GB and Radeon 4350 on Win10 x64 at work. It is the oldest platform compatible with Win 10, I believe. Runs great.

Windows 8 might be faster than 10 though.

swaaye wrote:

Windows 8 might be faster than 10 though.

I don't think it is.
I bought one of those "Windows 8 with Bing" machines, with an Atom-based dualcore SoC (Bay Trail), I think it was a Celeron N2840 or such, probably slower than a Core2 Duo.
I've upgraded it to Windows 10, and didn't notice a performance drop.

Scali wrote:

I don't think it is. I bought one of those "Windows 8 with Bing" machines, with an Atom-based dualcore SoC (Bay Trail), I think […]
Show full quote

swaaye wrote:

Windows 8 might be faster than 10 though.

I don't think it is.
I bought one of those "Windows 8 with Bing" machines, with an Atom-based dualcore SoC (Bay Trail), I think it was a Celeron N2840 or such, probably slower than a Core2 Duo.
I've upgraded it to Windows 10, and didn't notice a performance drop.

I have the exact opposite experience, I have a laptop with Celeron N2830, and when upgraded to windows 10 the bootup times went up by a pretty large amount, and I could no longer play League Of Legends with it since the already low performance went down to pretty much half on the GPU front. Also on my first generation Core I5 desktop computer the bootup times went up, and few games stopped working. Both of these machines got the upgrade installation though, so maybe it would be better with a clean install at least on the boot times, but I don't believe that clean installation will fix games not working and GPU performance drops.

Scali wrote:

I don't think it is.
I bought one of those "Windows 8 with Bing" machines, with an Atom-based dualcore SoC (Bay Trail), I think it was a Celeron N2840 or such, probably slower than a Core2 Duo.
I've upgraded it to Windows 10, and didn't notice a performance drop.

I have an ASUS x205 which is a cheap "Bing" Atom laptop - it sits slim and silent next to my telly and makes the perfect media centre. It came with Win 8.1 and I upgraded it to 10 immediately, but I recently reverted to 8.1 (not easy finding those Bing editions) because the sound was funky via HDMI.

I'd say that 8.1 and 10 are on par for speed, both feel very sprightly on this machine. This is my first experience with 8.1 - enjoying it so far.

I'm with Phil that it's probably the strength of the C2D combined with the 4GB of system memory. I remember reading something to the tune of 'Windows 10 runs great on netbooks!' so I tried it on my Asus Eee 1005PE with 2GB of RAM and a 60GB SanDisk SSD by doing a clean install and I was not impressed at all - it did boot up fast but it ran as slow (if not a bit slower) than the Windows 7 Starter that was originally there. Maybe I'm asking too much out of that poor machine.

My low-power Windows 10 story is my Samsung N150 netbook.

It's a 1.6 GHz Atom single-core processor with hyperthreading and 2GB of DDR3 memory, but it came with a 250 GB slow-as-dirt hard drive and Windows 7 Starter, which I had managed to get to a respectable usage speed by learning about lightweight software to replace the normally bloated ones, like replacing Adobe Reader with FoxIt Reader, Microsoft Office with Open Office (later Libra Office), using a custom app to force the background to change everyday instead of being locked to the Windows 7 Starter default one, etc.

Then I cloned the drive to a brand new Crucial MX100 256GB SSD and optimized the Windows 7 install for SSD performace....big difference in boot times and in program responsiveness during web browsing.

So when I upgraded it to Windows 10 and it gave me a bump to the full-blown HOME version, I was quite pleased. The boot times are about 3x faster than the Windows 7 boot times were, even on the SSD. But the program app performance is the same - Microsoft Edge runs about as fast as Internet Explorer did in Windows 7. And I haven't installed Google Chrome yet, but I doubt it'll be any better. I mean, it IS a slow Atom single-core, after all. I wish I could upgrade it to a dual-core Atom, but I can't. The thing's soldered to the motherboard.

I've been on Windows 10 for almost two months now. So far... it really doesn't feel all that different to Windows 8. I'm still getting used to the fact that I need to move the mouse to the left side of the screen instead of the right side to sleep/shutdown/restart, and I had to create quite the ridiculous workaround to get the calculator to come up with a keyboard shortcut, but so far there's very few differences.

I'm also not surprised that it can run on hardware that old. Windows 8 was sort of designed to be the one OS Microsoft could load onto any device they wanted, thus eliminating the need to have multiple OSes, which meant a lot of the overhead and bulk which slowed down XP, Vista and 7 was eliminated.

In terms of compatibility, Windows 10 is on par with Windows 8. A few things work better, a few things work worse, but it's mostly the same. I did go through and disable a whole slew of options, plus since I'm on Pro I switched over to the alternate branch which delays updates for three months. Win10 seems to be fairly decent at figuring out when I'm not using my system, though it only waits through about five to ten minutes of complete inactivity before it will decide to do updates and restarts if it has any planned, so I once came back after preparing food only to find the thing had done a complete restart and thus all of the things I had opened weren't open anymore.

That's when everything's working properly though. I had a Hell of a time getting my graphics drivers working properly, plus I was finding my system was constantly waking up from sleep and going back to sleep because of how the task scheduler was interacting with my virus scanner's scheduled scans. Edge is still pretty buggy and many websites don't work properly in it, so I'm still using a combination of IE and Firefox.

Dad on the other hand has been having some incredibly bizarre issues since his system updated. For instance, every time it boots up it tries and fails to load a DLL file called, "GrudgerHumpier.dll", or something along those lines, and attempting to search the net for info on it pulls up nothing, and when I try to go excise this from the system bootup process it's nowhere to be seen in the registry tables or elsewhere. Also, every so often, his task bar just stops working. You can still highlight things on it and when you click it looks as though it registered the click... but then nothing happens. Keyboard shortcuts to use it fail to work as well. I have not had any issues like this at all. :o

Gemini000 wrote:

Win10 seems to be fairly decent at figuring out when I'm not using my system, though it only waits through about five to ten minutes of complete inactivity before it will decide to do updates and restarts if it has any planned, so I once came back after preparing food only to find the thing had done a complete restart and thus all of the things I had opened weren't open anymore.

IMO that's just plain intolerable (I know...).

If you're on Pro, first thing to do: edit local group policy --> Computer Configuration --> Administrative Templates --> Window Components --> Windows Update

The key is to enable "No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installation"

(also applies to previous Pro versions of Windows, esp. 8/8.1 which I have also personally experienced same F*(#$%^in auto-restart forecefully closing my stuff)

I also have "Defer Upgrades and Updates" and "Configure Automatic Updates" enabled, but also "Allow automatic Updates immediate installation" enabled so that frequent security database updates don't require my manual checking.

Illustrations if needed:
http://superuser.com/questions/957267/how-to- … s-in-windows-10

Also another culprit to be addressed is in Task Scheduler --> ... --> UpdateOrchestrator --> "Reboot" (I rightfully disable it and own the file to prevent it from waking my system unasked for)
https://superuser.com/questions/973009/conclu … p/973029#973029

Just so that "Sleep" means Sleep again.

Can non Pro versions regedit the group policies in?

I don't even understand why you need a arbitrary version of Windows just to edit something that's integral to the OS. No wonder I switched to Linux...

DracoNihil wrote:

Can non Pro versions regedit the group policies in?

Only for Pro/Enterprise/Academic AFAIK. 🙁

This is the closest I could find to the hack you meant but no one confirmed it's working with 10 Home:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/disable-forced-r … windows-update/

Unfortunately MSFT seems intent on taking out Update-related hacks in Win10 Home (see latest comments):
http://www.askvg.com/fixing-windows-10-automa … nstall-problem/

Actually... even with Pro I'm not so sure anymore. I just tested manually looking for update, and it scheduled a restart . OK, I took a look at Task Scheduler and... yes, the "Reboot" task is already back on MSFT's hand. I can disable it again, but apparently it will not be permanent. 😠 Strange, as I checked the permissions, System still doesn't have right to Write (though I leave it accessible to Admin). I hope this is isolated to just that one event where the user manually runs "Check for updates".

I don't even understand why you need a arbitrary version of Windows just to edit something that's integral to the OS. No wonder I switched to Linux...

1) Supposed "convenience". Microsoft trying to out-Apple Apple
2) Home users = millions of test subjects / lab mice / guinea pigs
3) [Your theory goes here...]

At work I recently put Windows 10 Enterprise Evaluation on a basic Core 2 Duo (E4xxx) with 2 GB of memory. It worked great 😀

What I really like is how all the drivers were included and ready to go.