I never installed 10, I using Linux all time and I have only Linux on my computers installed, on my main rig I use Peppermint 7 which flying far better than even 7 or 8. I even using Steam on Peppermint and games I tried run better than on windows, I don`t like windows at all, because it using too much ram and harddisk, and 10 I more don`t like for spying everyone.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

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

Yea, the OS is quite efficient.
Problem is, in this day and age you need 500+ MB for every browser tab you open, for some script-riddled website.
So the OS can work great with 2 GB of memory, but applications don't 😀

But 10 uses without anything almost 900 MB of RAM and without anything installed, when I tried Vista x64 I saw only 500 MB used after launch.

Tiger433 wrote:

But 10 uses without anything almost 900 MB of RAM and without anything installed, when I tried Vista x64 I saw only 500 MB used after launch.

How much ram you had on the computer? I have noticed that no matter the amount of ram Windows 7 and up take around 30-35% of available ram. They are pretty good with giving that "used" memory back to programs when needed.

10 is amazing yes

I have it on my Daughter's computer, just wanted to test it, but it worked. Its an old Emachines 754 Sempron based system with 2gb of ram, it ran 32bit fine with a PCI 3450. sadly it wouldn't find drivers for the Geforce 6200 AGP 🤣.

and here at work, Our lowest system we will install 10 on is an Optiplex 755 which is a 2008 system

I never would have thought a Core 2 Duo was "old" either.

I also succeeded in upgrading a C2D with 4 GB of RAM. The Windows 7 installation was toast anyway – some kind of infection (maybe a rootkit) had gotten to it and it wouldn't even download updates anymore. Fortunately, you can download the Windows 10 installation to a USB drive for offline installation.

The first problem I encountered is that one of the first updates it wanted to install was almost 1 GB in size, and kept getting stuck at 95%. I eventually found an offline download for that one too.

The second problem I encountered is that the battery doesn't seem to be charging. I'm not sure if the battery is kaput (the little charging light on the front of the laptop still illuminates), or if Windows just isn't monitoring it correctly. I don't mess with laptops much, but this seems to be a common thing. Any ideas?

And the third problem is that immediately after logging in, the whole thing seems to be pretty unresponsive for about a minute. Not sure why yet.

archsan wrote:

Look for Win 10 Pro OEM key at $22~25 _NOW_

OEM keys can only be sold within a complete system or with the main parts of the system. Standalone OEM copies aren't OK from a legal standpoint.

In that case I'll be reselling the laptop (because adding an SSD makes me a legit builder)... to my father!

Seriously, I just realized that the perfectly legal way is to buy the Windows 8 (not 8.1) OEM instead and upgrade it in the next few days:
https://www.microsoft.com/OEM/en/licensing/sb … bid=fxBv0yYqKnr

Building a PC for personal use licensing comparison by product | Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro | OEM System builder product may be purchased.

Apart from this, I'm still on the fence about upgrading from Win7 Pro FPP which I bought full price years ago regarding transferrability.

Just installed Windows 10 Pro 64-bit clean on an 80 GB SATA hard drive in a Dell Optiplex 755 running a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo and 4GB of DDR2 memory. Works like a charm, but I'm missing a PCI Serial Port driver. Now I get to go purchase two Win10 license keys in order to make these old PCs work.

And for the record, the OS that was loaded on the HDD when I started was Windows XP Pro 32-bit. 🤣

candle_86 wrote:

it wouldn't find drivers for the Geforce 6200 AGP 🤣.

you mean windows update? that's normal, same happens with my 6100, it uses generic drivers
but all that I had to do is go to nvidia.com and download the latest geforce 6 drivers (under windows 8 ) it installs and works as usual on the 6100, I've used it for like 6 months or a year like this with no problems on 10 x64.
I only retired that PC because the motherboard is now defective (random shutdowns 🙁 ), nothing to do with win10.

Aideka wrote:

Tiger433 wrote:

But 10 uses without anything almost 900 MB of RAM and without anything installed, when I tried Vista x64 I saw only 500 MB used after launch.

How much ram you had on the computer? I have noticed that no matter the amount of ram Windows 7 and up take around 30-35% of available ram. They are pretty good with giving that "used" memory back to programs when needed.

I saw that when I tried 10 with only 1 GB RAM but even with that 10 was almost usable, and I tried that with Radeon X300SE on PCIE and with that card efects ran good, but I don`t like windows I deleted 10 after 5 minutes of testing. For me 7 or 10 using too much RAM, for example in Peppermint I have only 25%-30% when I have running Firefox, Audacious, and few programs at once. Normally after logon I see almost only 400 MB used, so any newer windows don`t have start to this.

when I tried 10 x64 with 1GB it was not really usable; considering the cheap tablets with 1GB I guess the 32bit version (which is what they use, even if their CPU is capable of 64bit) would fare better...
2GB is fine, 1.5GB is probably a big improvement over 1GB.

My netbook has Windows 10 Home 32-bit and runs acceptably fine on my Netbook with 2GB of RAM and a 1.6GHz Atom single-core with HT.

clueless1 wrote:

... I remember back when 10 first came out, I did see a few compatibility issues (like some Win7 laptop trackpads not having Win10 drivers, ...

Unfortunately there are laptops from well known manufacturers that still don't have support for their touchpad, neither from the manufacturer nor from MS. And Win7 drivers don't work and even touchpad manufacturer doesn't offer drivers, a dead end. An example would be Samsung's laptops using the Elan touchpad.

Windows 10 has memory compression which ought to make it work better than even 8 for low RAM systems. But I wonder about the CPU overhead of that. I have some doubts about it being a plus on a weak single core system.

All right, so I've been using Win10 on a few different machines just to see how it scales and behaves with a bunch of different configurations. My 4 test machines were:

-Pentium M 755 @ 2.72GHz, 2GB DDR2, 8800GTS-640MB, i915 chipset.
-Phenom II X6 1090T @ 4.07GHz, 16GB DDR3, GTX680, 890FX chipset, X-Fi Ti audio
-i7-4930K @ 4.5GHz, 32GB DDR3, GTX970, x79 chipset.
-The laptop I mentioned in the original post.
-I used spare mechanical hard drives (250-500GB) to test Win10 on each machine.

While initial impressions were favorable, the rough edges are unfortunately beginning to show. On only one machine was Windows 10 nearly as trouble free as Win7. Here are a few of the things I noticed.

-Win10 has higher DPC latency than Win7 on all 4 of the machines. On the Phenom and i7, this doesn't seem to cause any problems. However, on the Pentium M rig and C2D laptop, the increased DPC latency results in random bursts of choppy audio while watching online video. On the laptop, high disk activity occasionally results in choppy UI and pointer movement.

-On the Phenom machine, Win10 installed the wrong driver for the X-Fi audio card. Despite being correctly identified as "X-Fi" in the volume slider, the audio stuttered and was out of balance. Sometimes I'd get no sound at all. Fortunately, installing Creative's latest Win10 driver fixed this issue.

-I really don't like the automatic driver updates. I remember being able to disable driver updates in the original release of Win10, but it looks like they removed that option in v1511. I had the latest GeForce driver (368) installed for the GTX 680 in the Phenom machine. When I swapped in a GTX 760, the 368 driver was automatically applied to the new card 2 minutes after booting up. Great! HOWEVER, five minutes later, Windows decided to wipe out the 368 driver and install 353 from Windows Update. So I had to manually install 368 a second time.

-On the Phenom machine, my USB mouse and keyboard would always stop working after every reboot. I'd have to plug them into different USB ports to get them going again.
Here's what would happen: The mouse and KB LEDs would light up normally during POST and the initial Windows splash screen. However, when the splash screen "blinks" (indicating that Windows is almost finished loading), the LEDs shut off. Windows then indicates that my USB devices have malfunctioned. Seriously, Microsoft? You broke USB HID drivers?

-What is up with Windows Search? It's not as quick and accurate as it was in Windows 7. Disabling Web search and Cortana helps immensely, but it's still far from consistent. For example, a search for Device Manager worked properly on 3 out of the 4 systems I tested. However, on the laptop, Search refused to find it. Very annoying. Sometimes after a reboot, Search takes a while to get back up and running.

-Umm, I disabled Cortana. So why is it randomly using small slices of HDD/CPU (noticeable on the slower systems)? Is it updating? I have no idea. Ugh.

-On the laptop, Edge would occasionally get stuck in a restart loop. I'd close the browser, then see it continuously re-open in the taskbar. I had to kill the process in Task Manager.

-Is the Start menu a seperate "app" now? Is it no longer integrated to Explorer? Sure seems that way! Twice my Start menu just stopped working for seemingly no reason. Restarting Explorer did not fix the issue; I had to reboot the entire OS. That was never a problem under Windows 7. Also, I noticed that it would sometimes take awhile for the Start Menu to become responsive after booting up. Probably wouldn't be an issue if I had my SSDs plugged in, but I was testing the OS with spinners.

-The only reason Win10 boots up faster than Win7 is because, by default, it cheats a little. Unlike 7, which does a full shut down and startup of the entire OS, Win10 does some sort of a hybrid sleep thing. However, selecting Restart forces Win10 to do a full shutdown, and man is the resulting startup slow! On HDD based systems, a full Win10 startup is quite a bit slower than a full Win7 startup.

-Speaking of speed, synthetic CPU and GPU tests show Win10 to be roughly the same speed as Win7 running newer benchmarks and games. Win7 is slightly faster at older benchmarks/games. Win7 is also more compatible with ancient games, but I guess that's to be expected. Win98 was more compatible with DOS games than XP ever was.

So yeah. Windows 10 is certainly in better shape than it was a year ago, but it looks like I'm going to have to wait yet another year before I use it as my main OS. Win7 still feels more polished and sturdy. But hey--at least I got all 6 of my spare Win7 COAs updated!

Standard Def Steve wrote:

-What is up with Windows Search? It's not as quick and accurate as it was in Windows 7. Disabling Web search and Cortana helps immensely, but it's still far from consistent. For example, a search for Device Manager worked properly on 3 out of the 4 systems I tested. However, on the laptop, Search refused to find it. Very annoying. Sometimes after a reboot, Search takes a while to get back up and running.

This is what's keeping me on Windows 7 pretty much.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

All right, so I've been using Win10 on a few different machines just to see how it scales and behaves with a bunch of different […]
Show full quote

All right, so I've been using Win10 on a few different machines just to see how it scales and behaves with a bunch of different configurations. My 4 test machines were:

-Pentium M 755 @ 2.72GHz, 2GB DDR2, 8800GTS-640MB, i915 chipset.
-Phenom II X6 1090T @ 4.07GHz, 16GB DDR3, GTX680, 890FX chipset, X-Fi Ti audio
-i7-4930K @ 4.5GHz, 32GB DDR3, GTX970, x79 chipset.
-The laptop I mentioned in the original post.
-I used spare mechanical hard drives (250-500GB) to test Win10 on each machine.

While initial impressions were favorable, the rough edges are unfortunately beginning to show. On only one machine was Windows 10 nearly as trouble free as Win7. Here are a few of the things I noticed.

-Win10 has higher DPC latency than Win7 on all 4 of the machines. On the Phenom and i7, this doesn't seem to cause any problems. However, on the Pentium M rig and C2D laptop, the increased DPC latency results in random bursts of choppy audio while watching online video. On the laptop, high disk activity occasionally results in choppy UI and pointer movement.

-On the Phenom machine, Win10 installed the wrong driver for the X-Fi audio card. Despite being correctly identified as "X-Fi" in the volume slider, the audio stuttered and was out of balance. Sometimes I'd get no sound at all. Fortunately, installing Creative's latest Win10 driver fixed this issue.

-I really don't like the automatic driver updates. I remember being able to disable driver updates in the original release of Win10, but it looks like they removed that option in v1511. I had the latest GeForce driver (368) installed for the GTX 680 in the Phenom machine. When I swapped in a GTX 760, the 368 driver was automatically applied to the new card 2 minutes after booting up. Great! HOWEVER, five minutes later, Windows decided to wipe out the 368 driver and install 353 from Windows Update. So I had to manually install 368 a second time.

-On the Phenom machine, my USB mouse and keyboard would always stop working after every reboot. I'd have to plug them into different USB ports to get them going again.
Here's what would happen: The mouse and KB LEDs would light up normally during POST and the initial Windows splash screen. However, when the splash screen "blinks" (indicating that Windows is almost finished loading), the LEDs shut off. Windows then indicates that my USB devices have malfunctioned. Seriously, Microsoft? You broke USB HID drivers?

-What is up with Windows Search? It's not as quick and accurate as it was in Windows 7. Disabling Web search and Cortana helps immensely, but it's still far from consistent. For example, a search for Device Manager worked properly on 3 out of the 4 systems I tested. However, on the laptop, Search refused to find it. Very annoying. Sometimes after a reboot, Search takes a while to get back up and running.

-Umm, I disabled Cortana. So why is it randomly using small slices of HDD/CPU (noticeable on the slower systems)? Is it updating? I have no idea. Ugh.

-On the laptop, Edge would occasionally get stuck in a restart loop. I'd close the browser, then see it continuously re-open in the taskbar. I had to kill the process in Task Manager.

-Is the Start menu a seperate "app" now? Is it no longer integrated to Explorer? Sure seems that way! Twice my Start menu just stopped working for seemingly no reason. Restarting Explorer did not fix the issue; I had to reboot the entire OS. That was never a problem under Windows 7. Also, I noticed that it would sometimes take awhile for the Start Menu to become responsive after booting up. Probably wouldn't be an issue if I had my SSDs plugged in, but I was testing the OS with spinners.

-The only reason Win10 boots up faster than Win7 is because, by default, it cheats a little. Unlike 7, which does a full shut down and startup of the entire OS, Win10 does some sort of a hybrid sleep thing. However, selecting Restart forces Win10 to do a full shutdown, and man is the resulting startup slow! On HDD based systems, a full Win10 startup is quite a bit slower than a full Win7 startup.

-Speaking of speed, synthetic CPU and GPU tests show Win10 to be roughly the same speed as Win7 running newer benchmarks and games. Win7 is slightly faster at older benchmarks/games. Win7 is also more compatible with ancient games, but I guess that's to be expected. Win98 was more compatible with DOS games than XP ever was.

So yeah. Windows 10 is certainly in better shape than it was a year ago, but it looks like I'm going to have to wait yet another year before I use it as my main OS. Win7 still feels more polished and sturdy. But hey--at least I got all 6 of my spare Win7 COAs updated!

Are you sure about that? Windows 10 does this hardware HASH thing and saves it for Activation on their servers now. I'd wonder if the code will always work now or just Windows 10 on that specific machine will always work now.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

-Win10 has higher DPC latency than Win7 on all 4 of the machines. On the Phenom and i7, this doesn't seem to cause any problems. However, on the Pentium M rig and C2D laptop, the increased DPC latency results in random bursts of choppy audio while watching online video. On the laptop, high disk activity occasionally results in choppy UI and pointer movement.

This is exactly the problem I faced on my little ASUS x205ta laptop, which came with Windows 8.1 "Bing", but did say "plays well with Windows 10" on the box. After a variable period of time the audio was transformed into a crackling mess, and the problem seemed to be DPC latency. It only happened over HDMI - headphone out was OK - so I was convinced I could fix it, but I threw all of my nerd skills at it over the course of months and no dice.

I've since reinstalled Win 8.1 and it works like a dream - I actually really like 8.1! You get the good stuff from 10 with some 7 thrown in (i.e. slightly less locked down).

FFXIhealer wrote:

Are you sure about that? Windows 10 does this hardware HASH thing and saves it for Activation on their servers now. I'd wonder if the code will always work now or just Windows 10 on that specific machine will always work now.

Depends on the original code AFAIK, if it's an OEM key then it should be tied to that machine (motherboard). If the original is a FPP key (full packaged product / retail) then you will (should!) be able to transfer to another machine later (may have to do phone activation, but in any case nothing to worry about as long as you have the original retail key/CoA).