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Win7 for single core ?


vinifera

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I hope mods won't transferr this post to modding section
I am aware of various win7 tweaking ... I did it myself ...
BUT, my question is, is anyone aware of lets call it such version of win7 that runs fluently on Athlon XP CPU's and its equivalents
I know that regarding single core CPU's only Intel with 3 GHz+ was able to run NT 6 without lag

but I always wonder what is such thing that causes it... I mean, my Athlon XP unfortunately can run only win xp, but
in therms of speed it is 2.6 GHz, yet it lags ...

so there you have it, a question above, or is it really hardware limitation ?

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I have installed Windows 7 on an old Athlon XP machine with the following specs:

CPU: Athlon XP 3200

M\B: Abit AN7 nforce2 ultra

RAM: 2*1gb Corsair

GPU: Leadtek geforce 7800gs.

HDD: Maxtor 80gb SATA

DVDRW: some IDE model.

The system is running just fine with all the drivers installed and I can browse the web, play videos and mp3's with no problem. The only major hurdle is the lack of SSE2 instruction set that prevents many software form installing. I must say that the same system with Windows XP SP3 POS updates installed is running much, much better: all the benchmarks are scoring at least 25% higher and the system feels more responsive. I will post screenshots when I get home!

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I confirm your findings. My now decommissioned A7V600-X with an  Athlon XP 3000+ run XP SP3 great... but the lack of SSE2 annoyed me to the point of eventually decommissioning it. :(
The worse part of it is that planned obsolescence, enforced by MS, not actual need, is actually the main problem, for most cases: MS VC++ 2012 (released 10/31/2012), was the 1st MS VS that enabled SSE2 by default (and all its successors do so, too). For MS VC++ 2012, it was possible to compile for non-SSE, by using the /arch:SSE and /Oi- compiler directives, but I don't  know whether later MS VS versions still offer such compiler directives or not. In any case, since the default became to compile for SSE2 from MS VC++ 2012 on, almost no author ever bothered to disable that, even if SSE2 instructions weren't actually needed or helpful for the software being compiled. :(
That's why I reckon that, nowadays, non-SSE2 machines are already a lost game. :wacko:

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  • 4 months later...
On 7/20/2017 at 9:10 PM, ND22 said:

I have installed Windows 7 on an old Athlon XP machine with the following specs:

CPU: Athlon XP 3200

M\B: Abit AN7 nforce2 ultra

RAM: 2*1gb Corsair

GPU: Leadtek geforce 7800gs.

HDD: Maxtor 80gb SATA

DVDRW: some IDE model.

The system is running just fine with all the drivers installed and I can browse the web, play videos and mp3's with no problem. The only major hurdle is the lack of SSE2 instruction set that prevents many software form installing. I must say that the same system with Windows XP SP3 POS updates installed is running much, much better: all the benchmarks are scoring at least 25% higher and the system feels more responsive. I will post screenshots when I get home!

well a Maxtor 80Gb hard drive might be more than big enough for XP, it seems almost small for later OSes like Vista & Win7.

I got a used Compaq SR1303WM computer (with an ASUS A7V8X-LA Kelut board) using an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (2.2Ghz) CPU with 2x1Gb Patriot RAM sticks and a Western Digital 120Gb 5400RPM hard drive (darn, shoulda put in a 7200RPM drive for faster HD access) running a 32bit Win7 Professional just fine with little or no lags.  GPU I had on there was an nVidia Geforce 5200FX AGP 8x card and also had a LiteOn SHW-160P6S DVD writer.

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80GB for OS is just fine for Vista or 7. If you every save or create data then it isn't a good size, but it depends on what kind of data you use. I use an 80GB in my Win7 32bit at home without a problem, but I have additional disks to keep files and some programs.

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For Windows 8 I just use 60 GB for the OS partition and the basic programs and it still has plenty of free space. I have the rest of my stuff on other partitions. I think this is the best practice, especially when it comes to imaging the OS partition for backup purposes.

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60 GB for 8.1 x64 and 7SP1 x64, and 40 GB for 8.1 x86, 7SP1 x86 and XP SP3 are plenty of space. One can fit two x64 or three x86 independent boot partitions in the average 120 GB SSD, and that's a great option: easy and fast to image for backup, not too expensive, in what regards hardware and works great and fast!

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Long time ago i installed Windows'95 on a 40 MB HDD using Stacker disk compression utility. There was even some space left for user applications. When i see a new OS running on a new hardware that is at least 100 times faster, i wish to ask a single question: "What it does all the other time after perform the same tasks?"

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The speed is mostly relative, or not really noticable to humans, of an old OS on period hardware vs a new OS on modern hardware. This goes against what many people think because they will remember their Windows 95 computer running really slow, but this is more of a selective memory. I have had Windows 95 computers on Pentium MMX with 5200RPM HDD be able to boot and run standard Windows stuff the same speed as a Windows 7 on a quad core and an SSD. In either case, the computer gets slower with time, installing software and/or failing hardware and people remember when their computers were slow and not when they were fast. I think that Windows has gotten slower over time, which is to be expected considering all the stuff they have just been adding onto it over the years.

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  • 5 months later...

sadly the ASUS A7V8X-LA Kelut on the old Compaq computer died a few months ago.  So I no longer have any "single core" CPUs left to use, except maybe an old hyperthreaded Intel Pentium 4 prescott (524) 3.06Ghz processor but that will require a different motherboard which I did find a few years ago and have installed a different board & the Intel P4 onto the Compaq computer.

Edit 6/21: And it looks like new Win7 updates in 2018 will not be compatible with CPUs without SSE2 support (aka. Intel Pentium 3s, AMD Athlon XPs, VIA C3s) as Microsoft will not even attempt to make them compatible with non-SSE2 processors.

Article on Computerworld about Microsoft "quietly" cutting off Win7 support for older Intel CPUs.

Edited by erpdude8
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