Experiment: Installing Windows 10 On a 7-Year-Old Acer Aspire One

jones_supa writes: Windows 10 will launch in less than a week and it is supposed to work flawlessly on devices already powered by Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, as Microsoft struggled to keep system requirements unchanged to make sure that everything runs smoothly. Device drivers all the way back to Windows Vista platform (WDDM 1.0) are supported. Softpedia performed a practical test to see how Windows 10 can run on a 7-year-old Acer Aspire One netbook powered by Intel Atom N450 processor clocked at 1.66 GHz, 1 GB of RAM, and a 320 GB mechanical hard disk. The result is surprising to say the least, as installation not only went impressively fast, but the operating system itself also works fast.

Comments

Re:I find it intersting this article exist:

[supremebob]

I have that Acer Aspire One with the same system specs as well. It's running Windows 7 fairly well, but even doing something simple like watching a Youtube or CNN video on it will bring the entire system to it's knees. It just doesn't have either the memory or the processing power to decode video with a decent framerate.

I guess that it would be fine if you used it for word processing with an old version of Word, but it simply cannot handle a modern web browser.

Re:No Point without SecureBoot

[jones_supa]

There is no UEFI SecureBoot requirement in Windows 8 or 10. At least I have been able to install to any kinds of machines just fine.

Re:OS X

[ratbag]

My Late 2009 Mac Mini is running Plex server and home theatre on 10.10.4. First quote I could find about system requirements (from a Mac World article here )

Like Yosemite, El Capitan can run on the following Macs:

iMac (Mid-2007 or later)

MacBook (13-inch Aluminum, Late 2008), (13-inch, Early 2009 or later)

MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid-2009 or later), (15-inch, Mid/Late 2007 or later), (17-inch, Late 2007 or later)

MacBook Air (Late 2008 or later)

Mac Mini (Early 2009 or later)

Mac Pro (Early 2008 or later)

Xserve (Early 2009)

So, which of your three-year old machines is not on that list?

Re: ... and the hype for Windows 10 begins....

[jones_supa]

They are rectangular/square, just like the taskbar icons in Windows 7 that everyone I know loves.

Take a closer look.

The taskbar icons in Windows 7 have glass effect, nice diagonal gradient and rounded corners. Try hovering the mouse cursor over icons of running applications: there is even a sleek little lamp effect which follows the cursor, and the color of that effect matches the application icon. Also the icon of the active application has brighter background than others.

These kind of small touches are missing in the Windows 10 UI.

A return to performance?

[ledow]

Is it just me that feels that this isn't a win for Windows 10, but actually a degradation of Windows Vista/7 and - to some extent - 8 in terms of performance losses at those points?

I know that XP -> Vista and XP->7 felt like backward steps at times in terms of performance, and were accompanied by a similar ramp-up in terms of realistic minimum specs. It just seems that in 8 (which is as fast as 7, if not faster, as far as I can tell) and 10 are actually coming back to what they should always have been?

Just junk like Superfetch services and Windows Search - I feel if you were to optimise those more efficiently that they'd easily show a performance improvement. I know that disabling them certainly does (fun fact: Disabling Windows Search on Windows 8 stops you installing new keyboard languages!).

Windows 8 has been my last two mass deployments and, with a few third-party-cured interface problems, is just as good to the users as 7 was, but actually boots, resumes, etc. much faster. And the amount of sheer built-in hardware drivers is phenomenal. I no longer need several images to image dozens of types and models of computer, laptop, all-in-one, etc. just one image will do with maybe a tweak if something requires the very latest graphics drivers.

Windows 10 appears to be continuing this trend of a RETURN to performance, rather than performing miracles. Hardware hasn't got much faster since the Windows 7 days - maybe a core or two more, maybe a graphics card upgrade, but the base CPU/RAM/disk are pretty much in the same area.

I mean, it's good either way. But it shouldn't be shocking. Optimised versions of 7 were sold with netbooks for years, and their hardware was severely limited for a long time. It was just a matter of turning junk off.

My min spec of "Dual or-more-core anything with 4Gb RAM" has held for several years in a row now for business systems, and can be satisfied for a virtual pittance. Only very recently have I contemplated enhancing that to 8Gb of RAM and maybe an SSD as a luxury, but the rest is pretty static.

Re: ... and the hype for Windows 10 begins....

[PRMan]

This is not true. There is a performance impact on many Windows 7 machines. But if so, you can just go to Advanced settings and click "Display for Best Performance" and you're done. Windows 10 makes this the default, more or less (although the RTM added a lot of Glass effects which does look nicer than the previous betas).