Windows 7 never ceases to amaze me. I recently brought up a Win 7 Home pro box using, some pretty archaic by modern standards hardware. While not the most stellar performer, it does surf the web well enough and considering that was it’s intended mission I’d say it’s been successful.
Actual specs are:
- Intel P4 2.4GHz Northwood Core (overclocked to 2.6GHz)
- Asus P4P800 (865PE chipset) motherboard
- 3COM 3C940 Giga-e LOM
- On board ADI AD1985 Audio
- On board VIA 6309 firewire controller
- SATA via IHC5R
- 2 UDMA 133 ports via VIA 6410
- 1.5GB of DDR RAM in dual channel mode (2x 512MB sticks 2x 256MB sticks)
- nVidia Geforce FX 5700LE
- 500GB Western Digital SATA Caviar drive
I was utterly impress that not only did everything work, but everything was detected and worked right out of the box. Even installing to the SATA controller which was always a problem for Windows XP. Though I guess I really shouldn’t be so surprised by 9 years of OS development.
None the less, the real concern was performance. Of which the machine scores a blister, okay not really, 3.2 on the Windows Performance index. The limiting factor actually being the CPU.
I don’t know what I found to be more surprising, the fact that all the old hardware worked under the new OS or that the system is just as usable with more features and better security as XP SP3 was on the same hardware.