I did it on a k6-3+

If I recall RTM didn’t work but sp1 did and you need 384mb of ram minimum unless you patch the iso in a hex editor.

It’s worthlessly slow. Not really worth it other than to say you did.

Before the fire I still had my Asus P55T2P4 with 512 megabytes of EDO and a K6-2+, and I decided to try Windows 7 on it just for the heck of it. I think it was still in the process of installing after two days of letting it run, and I gave up.

Oh yeah it's definitely pretty slow, but I have this thing where I like to push old system to their absolute limits. It's "fun". I'd install Windows 11 if didn't need NX, TPM and SSE!

As I said, I've done it before on a P233 MMX and it was painfully slow. I've never done it on a fast K6-2 though. I was kind of assuming a 550 MHz would at least be kind of usable. Not the case eh? It got through the setup at least to the point of asking for product key in around 30-ish minutes which is better than I expected.

I'll try a different SP1 ISO and see what happens.

UselessSoftware wrote on 2023-09-19, 01:08:

Oh yeah it's definitely pretty slow, but I have this thing where I like to push old system to their absolute limits. It's "fun". I'd install Windows 11 if didn't need NX, TPM and SSE!

11 doesn't need TPM - if you turn off the checks, it will install fine on, say, a C2Q with no TPM. That's the oldest machine I've tried it on...

It does, however, need x64... and I think some early x64 CPUs might be missing some required instructions.

I got this working.

Turns out there was some issue with the NIC that was causing the system to hang. I removed it and replaced it with another one. Everything works fine, nice and stable. So far...

🤣 good for you.

One of my old super 7 boards had 768mb

Unofficially I think it would go full 1.5gb as it did support 512mb dimms although at the time I only had one.

If I had to guess 7 would run better with more ram

rmay635703 wrote on 2023-09-20, 02:55:

One of my old super 7 boards had 768mb

Unofficially I think it would go full 1.5gb as it did support 512mb dimms although at the time I only had one.

If I had to guess 7 would run better with more ram

It’s possible, but even a k6-3+ is horribly bogged down by 7’s bloat.

On 256mb 7 was able to memory manage down to I think like 120mb of ram idle if I recall. But yea, I think you are correct in that it would enjoy more ram to stretch its legs into.

Really, 586 stuff just needs to stick to 9x/ME if you want good responsiveness. Honestly it’s impressive how much faster even windows is under those processors if you stay with 9x/ME

I have a dual 233mmx setup that I’m gonna try 2k on because I wanna see how much better I can get games to run with the lighter windows footprint. Too bad there was never a smp 9x/me variant.

rmay635703 wrote on 2023-09-20, 02:55:

One of my old super 7 boards had 768mb

Unofficially I think it would go full 1.5gb as it did support 512mb dimms although at the time I only had one.

If I had to guess 7 would run better with more ram

It would definitely help a ton. At idle, on a stock 7 Pro SP1 install, I'm using about 260 MB here and 2-3% CPU usage (if you don't include what CPU taskmgr.exe is using itself).

A couple of programs running on top of that could have the 512 MB maxed out pretty easily. I need to disable unnecessary services, but I think much of it is just the kernel, under the hood, is more demanding.

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-09-20, 03:06:

It’s possible, but even a k6-3+ is horribly bogged down by 7’s bloat. […]
Show full quote

It’s possible, but even a k6-3+ is horribly bogged down by 7’s bloat.

On 256mb 7 was able to memory manage down to I think like 120mb of ram idle if I recall. But yea, I think you are correct in that it would enjoy more ram to stretch its legs into.

Really, 586 stuff just needs to stick to 9x/ME if you want good responsiveness. Honestly it’s impressive how much faster even windows is under those processors if you stay with 9x/ME

I have a dual 233mmx setup that I’m gonna try 2k on because I wanna see how much better I can get games to run with the lighter windows footprint. Too bad there was never a smp 9x/me variant.

I'm pretty happy with Windows 2000 performance even on high end Pentium MMX chips. 200-233 MHz handles it pretty well. I'm running 2k server on a P200 MMX OC'd to 225 (using server so I have terminal services) and it even plays games pretty well.

XP is where it starts to feel a little bloaty to me on a socket 7.

Let us know how it runs on your dual 233. 😀

That might even be good with XP honestly.

I’m really bummed that we will never see windows 7 on a dual 233mmx as I don’t believe any board supporting dual pentium 1 ever had (I forget what it’s called, some sort of thing they introduced on the 430tx south bridge that I think was for power management?) trying to remember.

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-09-20, 03:23:

I’m really bummed that we will never see windows 7 on a dual 233mmx as I don’t believe any board supporting dual pentium 1 ever had (I forget what it’s called, some sort of thing they introduced on the 430tx south bridge that I think was for power management?) trying to remember.

ACPI

Yeah that's a shame, I'd love to see that.

I wonder if removing the requirement from 7 is is something that some highly dedicated retronaut would be willing to look into.

Chugging along happily and stable! 😁

Usable if you're on benzos.

Cool 😎👍

Reminds me of https://www.winhistory.de/more/386/winq.htm

I think I experimented this as well, though the lowest I went was a Skt 462 Duron on a ECS K7VZA (KT133), and it surprisingly ran usable enough. A FX5200 later and I had Aero too.

I suppose I could try running it on a 440LX machine or even my very K6-2+ 550 machine... but I really am clueless to removing the ACPI and RAM checks. (aside from dropping 2x256SDR in the MVP3 board I have and praying it detects it all)

Jo22 wrote on 2023-09-20, 04:33:

Cool 😎👍

Reminds me of https://www.winhistory.de/more/386/winq.htm

Yes, but there's a fault on that page. I did run Windows NT 3.51 on a 486/33 with 5 MB RAM only. I'm not sure whether I have needed those 8 MB which were quoted during the installation process...

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-09-20, 03:06:

[...]

It’s possible, but even a k6-3+ is horribly bogged down by 7’s bloat.

No way is 7 going to run well on a system that slow, but it was far from bloated. At release, Windows 7 ran a lot better on RAM and CPU-limited low-end hardware (Atom-based netbooks were all the rage around then) than XP did, at least what XP had become after SP2 and 3. And let's not even mention Vista - even a PC that could run Crysis acceptably felt slow on that monstrotity.

UselessSoftware wrote on 2023-09-18, 23:32:

.....

It's not a RAM issue, I have 512 MB on it.

512MB RAM is very little for Windows 7.
So I would not try below 1GB, so the socket 7 platform is out.
But I understand you are just checking if it is possible.
Like Windows XP on a 486-Pentium Overdrive. That "runs", too.

CoffeeOne wrote on 2023-09-20, 15:42:

512MB RAM is very little for Windows 7. So I would not try below 1GB, so the socket 7 platform is out. But I understand you are […]
Show full quote

UselessSoftware wrote on 2023-09-18, 23:32:

.....

It's not a RAM issue, I have 512 MB on it.

512MB RAM is very little for Windows 7.
So I would not try below 1GB, so the socket 7 platform is out.
But I understand you are just checking if it is possible.
Like Windows XP on a 486-Pentium Overdrive. That "runs", too.

IMHO, 512MB is barely enough for XP (SP2/3).
At home we had 768MB in that Pentium III in ~2004, I vaguely remember.
By 2006-2008, it were 4 GB in another PC running XP SP2.

I still fail to see how people come up with these numbers.
I've ran XP SP2 and SP3 on as old as Deschutes 350MHz and 256MB of RAM with no issues.

The key here is how speedy your hard drive is. Trust me, it sounds weird, but it plays an important role.

For example - same machine (Luckystar 6BX2, P2 350, 256MB SDRAM) struggled with a 1.6GB WD Caviar 21600. Not just XP - any OS ran dog slow.
The exact same machine flied once I installed a bigger and newer Maxtor 6E040L0 and a BIOS patch.
Of course, this was before the internet updated so much that it made browsing on XP unusable due to TLS issues.