It will, but it's gonna be sluggish. I have the RC (build 7100) running on an old PC down in the basement - Athlon XP 2400+,1GB RAM, on-board GeForce2 and it runs nicely with all the whizbang aero effects turned off. A friend of mine has the RC running on a Duron 1.2Ghz with 640MB RAM and that works pretty nice too.
There's a couple of things you can do though that may increase performance.
1) Use a USB flash drive or memory card with ReadyBoost. Depending of the size of drive/card you use and the amount you assign to readyboost, you could see some good improvements in performance. Even if you go for the full 4GB though, you wont get the fancy Areo graphics.
2) Install more RAM. Maybe not the cheapest option but more guaranteed to improve performance, Bringing your total above 1GB will help and anything after that is a bonus. I'm guessing you're using DDR (which seems to be getting expensive again), check your motherboard specs, see what RAM speeds it supports and if it supports dual channel.
I'm looking forward to trying Win7 on my P4 2.8GHz with 2.5GB of DDR400 RAM and GeForce 6600GT, I'm hoping it runs well (and if it gives me Aero thats a bonus), as a backup though I've got a 4GB flash drive prepped for ReadyBoost.
Thanks everyone for answers! so it will work but might be a bit sluggish, which I don't care 'cause I'm planning to use it as a backup server. Tried XP, Ubuntu and I always had networking issues going on.Anyway glad to hear that it'll work! Well done MS! I hope 7 will do the trick here! RC, Heeeere I come!
@MikeWard1701
I just upgraded the RAM recently for Ubuntu. it is SDRAM! and quite expensive,it initially had only 256MB, I got another 512MB stick. I hope it would be enough I'm not going to pay $30 for a SDRAM in 2009! :)
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A question:
Will Windows 7 work on my 5 year old Pentium 4 1.6Ghz computer? with 768MB of RAM?
It will, but it's gonna be sluggish. I have the RC (build 7100) running on an old PC down in the basement - Athlon XP 2400+,1GB RAM, on-board GeForce2 and it runs nicely with all the whizbang aero effects turned off.
A friend of mine has the RC running on a Duron 1.2Ghz with 640MB RAM and that works pretty nice too.
Yeah, it will. That processor is about as powerful as the Atoms in netbooks, which run it fine.
It might be lacking for RAM though.
I installed in on my old P4 2GHz with 256MB(lol) RAM, it's quite snappy when not doing anything.
As Zane has said, it'll be sluggish.
There's a couple of things you can do though that may increase performance.
1) Use a USB flash drive or memory card with ReadyBoost. Depending of the size of drive/card you use and the amount you assign to readyboost, you could see some good improvements in performance. Even if you go for the full 4GB though, you wont get the fancy Areo graphics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readyboost
2) Install more RAM. Maybe not the cheapest option but more guaranteed to improve performance, Bringing your total above 1GB will help and anything after that is a bonus. I'm guessing you're using DDR (which seems to be getting expensive again), check your motherboard specs, see what RAM speeds it supports and if it supports dual channel.
I'm looking forward to trying Win7 on my P4 2.8GHz with 2.5GB of DDR400 RAM and GeForce 6600GT, I'm hoping it runs well (and if it gives me Aero thats a bonus), as a backup though I've got a 4GB flash drive prepped for ReadyBoost.
Thanks everyone for answers! so it will work but might be a bit sluggish, which I don't care 'cause I'm planning to use it as a backup server.
Tried XP, Ubuntu and I always had networking issues going on.Anyway glad to hear that it'll work! Well done MS! I hope 7 will do the trick here! RC, Heeeere I come!
@MikeWard1701
I just upgraded the RAM recently for Ubuntu. it is SDRAM! and quite expensive,it initially had only 256MB, I got another 512MB stick. I hope it would be enough I'm not going to pay $30 for a SDRAM in 2009! :)