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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.
I have about the same netbook, and I've never used the Windows 7 that came with it, but want to put it back specifically so I can put Windows 10 on it to play with it. I lost the Clonezilla image I made of it years ago and am on the verge of ordering the backup media from the Acer website - I've come up empty on a WIndows 7 Starter ISO. I've loved my little Acer, I've had three bike wrecks with it, one of which my entire body weight went up and down the thing twice as I rolled over my backpack, not a scratch. I double the RAM from 1 to 2 GB the day I bought it and put an SSD in later. The SSD was incredible when it came to increasing the battery life and performance. I've told people it's the laptop Fischer-Price made, and I say it in a bragging manner, I still love my little netbook.
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I have it on a Compaq C306US with 1 GB of RAM and a 1.73 GHz Celeron. It seemed impressive at first, but the daily Defender signature update brings the machine to its knees. Seriously, the mouse pointer will not even move, and when I was actually able to bring up Perfmon, CPU and disk were both at 100%. That's unusable. I guess the answer is to install another security package, but that's a serious WTF. In 2015, it would be nice if Microsoft had heard of I/O throttling.
The audio also doesn't work unless you disable it, then re-enable it in device manager. I reported this bug with every previous build to no avail.
I wouldn't complain, but Microsoft claimed that every Vista-capable PC could run Windows 10, and that appears to be false.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Do note that XP only needed 64 MB of RAM (128 MB recommended). The last XP system I supported was a couple years back, but the requirement had bloated to about 128 MB (256 MB recommended) because anti-virus software had gotten so much bigger (usually takes 30-50 MB of RAM).
For decades, software companies hadn't controlled bloat. They counted on performance gains in hardware to compensate for how much slower their software was getting due to bloat. This began to change after Prescott (around 2004), when the clock speed wars came to a screeching halt due to heat generated by power leakage at those higher frequencies, and for a time Intel lost the fastest CPU title crown to AMD. Intel and AMD began placing a greater emphasis on power efficiency rather than pure performance, and as a result the bloat in software began to outstrip increase in hardware speeds.
That's a large part of the reason Vista (2007) was such a dog. It was coded assuming the performance level of generally available hardware would be higher than it actually turned out to be. Consequently it felt like it ran a lot slower than XP (compared to when XP was new), and most users opted to stick with XP. Around 2010 we hit the point where all but the discount CPUs were "fast enough" for most people's needs, and advancements in CPU design since then have been directed mostly at reducing power consumption (a Core 2 Duo system at idle burns about 75 Watts, a Broadwell system burns about 20-30 Watts idle).
Software companies have had to come to grips with this performance stagnation, and are finally beginning to get bloat under control. Since they can no longer count on their newer software "feeling" faster because of hardware upgrades, they're forced to go through and optimize their software to make it actually run faster. Which is resulting in this curious inversion, where newer software actually runs better old systems than the previous versions of that software.
The industry is in for a major shake-up because of this in the next decade (arguably it's already been experiencing it the past 5 years). As the need to upgrade your computer every 2-3 years decreases, computers will be used for longer times. That means on an annual basis, hardware companies will have reduced sales (if people go from replacing their computer every 3 years to every 6 years, that means half the annual sales even though the same number of people are still using computers). And software companies will be expected to support their products for longer.
Mobile (phones) is the one area this hasn't really taken hold because the sector has been developing so quickly you feel obligated to upgrade your smartphone every 1-2 years. But eventually it too will plateau. Long-term, we're probably looking at computers having to last 7-10 years before being replaced. Which interestingly enough is about the timescale for console systems (6-7 years between refreshes).