What does Windows 7 run on?

In Thursday’s blog post on Windows 7 release dates, I asked if you’d had a chance to run the Beta or Release Candidate version on one of your older machines yet – and I received a welcome deluge of emails from people who had.

It would take me ages to give you all of the scientific details of configurations, so instead I’ve gone for a ready reckoner table of the responses.

Thanks to the EduGeek community too, as they have continued to provide more examples of kit they’ve tried it on. The emerging view is that whilst it will install on 512MB RAM, it is slower than XP on older kit, but when you move to 1GB RAM it’s faster.
You can read more on the EduGeek Windows 7 forum

I haven’t yet received a single email from somebody who has failed to get Windows 7 running on one of their computers, which I think is probably even more significant than the detail in the list below! (See the bottom for my own inglorious failure!)

So, for your delight and delectation…

Fabulous successes

Manufacturer	Laptop	Basic Spec	Notes
Acer	Aspire One	16GB SSD disk	Alex Billing has been running this since Beta release
Acer	Travelmate C110	1GHz Centrino 1.5GB RAM	Everything was fine, but needed new graphics driver
Apple	MacBookPro	2GB RAM, 32GB disk	Grumbledook (aka Tony) had this working with the Beta and the RC – see the comments for more
Apple	MacMini	1GB RAM	Grumbledook again – this time a little trickier, and reported as quite slow and needing quite a few driver tweaks.
Asus	Eee PC 1000H	1GB RAM, 80GB Disk	Ceri had this running Win 7 at BETT
Dell	Mini 9	1GB RAM, 16GB SSD disk	Reported as “faster than XP SP3”! And this was on the Beta
Dell	Mini 12	1GB RAM, 1.6Ghz Atom	Chris reported “it works great, noticeably faster than the install of Vista that came with it”
Dell	Optiplex 745	Desktop	Ceri Morriss has been running it for a while on his desktop, and also runs well on 755
Dell	Studio 15	4GB RAM	Chris pointed out that this worked perfectly (I’d hope so too, with a greedy 4GB of RAM!)
Elonex	Webbook	1GB RAM, 80GB Disk	Ceri had this running Win 7 at BETT
Ergo	Microlite	512MB RAM & 1.4GHz proc	Ben said “It's a bit slow with the 512 especially when swapping to disk but general performance seems better than XP”
HiGrade	Notino L100	1GB RAM, 80GB Disk	Ceri had this running Win 7 at BETT
HP	Tablet 2710p	2GB RAM	Chris Rothwell reported it as “snappy”!
HP	MiniNote	2GB RAM	Alex Pearce says this one is fine too
HP	Compaq 6735s	2GB RAM	Rob reported that it needed a driver installing for HP DriveGuard 3D, but apart from that everything else worked straight away. Thanks Rob, for telling me that I'd read "3D" and assuming it was a graphics card. Double thanks for telling me in an email, rather than shaming me publically
Lenovo	T61p	2GB RAM, 160GB Disk	Working well as on laptop used every day
Lenovo	X61	2GB RAM, 100GB Disk	My every day laptop - Better performance than Vista
RM	One	512MB RAM	Teky says it’s slow with 512MB RAM
Samsung	R40	1GB RAM, 80GB Disk	My demo laptop - Simple install and didn’t require any additional drivers later.
Samsung	NC10	1GB is okay, 2GB is better	Alex Pearce reports he’s “very happy” on this! Matt recommend getting 2GB And the Cookie Monster said that the best bit is waking from Sleep in 3 seconds
Sony	Viao	1GB RAM, 1GHz processor	Leighton didn’t have the model number for this (his wife’s!) but he reckoned it was at least 5 years old. He did have to download the Vista drivers for wireless and sound, but apart from that, it was easy.
Toshiba	NB100		Ceri had this running Win 7 at BETT
Toshiba	Portege M400	2GB RAM	Leighton Searle reported this was a straightforward install
Toshiba	Satellite Pro A10	1GB RAM and 2 GHz Celeron	Alex Billing at Wilsthorpe College says “…but the one that impressed me is the 8 year old Toshiba Satellite..which runs very smoothly, I think even better than it runs XP” Zeem1 from EduGeek reported it runs well on just 512MB RAM “unless I try and do too many things at once”!
Toshiba	Tecra M700		Accura2000 reported “Everything works and the touch screen has better support than in Vista”
Viglen	Dossier NS		This is a very old computer – DrPerceptron from EduGeek reported “I could NEVER get it to run XP SP2/3 properly – and it works faultlessly…doesn’t run Aero, but then I didn’t expect it to work at all”

Also, take a look at the Windows Club forum, where somebody has Windows 7 running on an old P2 processor (266MHz) and 96MB RAM - which is definitely NOT in my list of "recommended things to do". And PC World are reporting "Windows 7 hits a new low" - the 'new low' is lower specification hardware.

Glorious failures…

Manufacturer	Laptop	Basic Spec	Notes
Asus	Eee PC 900	1GB RAM, 12GB Disk	This was one of the very early EeePCs, so not a surprise! I tried and failed, because the 12GB storage was on two physical drives– one was 4GB and the other was 8GB. And Windows 7 needed more than 8GB to install. However, I read an article over the weekend that gave me some hints, and I’m going to have another bash, just to be able to say “Yes, it works!”