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Portables Windows Hardware

Experiment: Installing Windows 10 On a 7-Year-Old Acer Aspire One 405

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

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  • by pecosdave ( 536896 ) on Thursday July 23, 2015 @08:01AM (#50167095) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • 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.

      These netbooks are so old they actually originally came with XP; I have an Acer Aspire D250 right here, and I use it regularly. I would upgrade it, but the screen is so pathetic there's no point. Anything which needs more RAM needs more screen resolution, too.

      • I think mine is a little newer than the one in the article, mine is a D255E-1853. I liked mine so much that when a year or so later I bought my daughter a bit newer model, both of ours came with Windows 7 Starter, but both have been running Linux for quite a while. Mine still has Kubuntu despite the fact I quit installing that in favor of Netrunner a couple of years ago and hers has Elementary OS on it.

      • by gwolf ( 26339 ) <`gwolf' `at' `gwolf.org'> on Thursday July 23, 2015 @08:20AM (#50167209) Homepage

        I bought my first-generation Acer Aspire One in 2008, back when the "netbook" segment was still new. It even became my main computer for some months, and was quite happy with it — Except, of course, for the 9" 1024x600 screen.

        Two years ago, I upgraded to a Acer Aspire One 756. Better processor and more memory allow me to virtualize whenever I need to do some Windows stuff (twice a year or so). That and a 10.5" 1366x768 screen, with mostly the same weight became godsend.

        Having a computer that allows me to upgrade once every five years, and that can be bought at US$300 at the supermarket... That's what I call convenience.

        • by pecosdave ( 536896 ) on Thursday July 23, 2015 @08:41AM (#50167347) Homepage Journal

          I was upset when Microsoft decided they didn't want Netbooks to exist anymore and used their clout to force the reputable companies out of making them. I laughed my butt off when they came back in the name of Chromebooks - the first Acer Chromebooks as far as I could tell were basically a repurposed Aspire One anyways. These are actually seeing some real adoption, schools in particular in this area require kids to have a Chromebook, that they will issue, or something that will do the same things as a Chromebook if a parent will provide (my buddy sent his daughter with a first gen Surface tablet with Chrome).

          I see the entire Chromebook phenomenon as a fuck you to Microsoft for the bullying they pulled forcing manufacturers out of that market anyways. The fact ChromeOS is Linux they pushed them right back where I thought they should be (mostly) anyways.

          On that note - Chrome does horrible full-screen, which is almost a requirement on a netbook. I went back to Firefox over it on my netbook, and went back to it everywhere as a result. Glad I did, I'm not happy with the current state of Chrome.

          • Chrome does horrible full-screen

            They really need to adopt something more like their mobile UI for full-screen mode. Scrolling up shows the browser navigation / url bar and scrolling down scrolls it off-screen.

    • 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.

      • by kesuki ( 321456 )

        "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."

        your guess fails. here is a 'modern' browser that will run on this old hardware without bringing it to it's knees.
        http://lynx.browser.org/ [browser.org]

        • by jedidiah ( 1196 )

          That browser is in no way modern.

          That's something you can run on a VMS terminal, a relic so old that it probably predates you.

      • With (upgraded) 2GB of RAM and Linux/KDE using the Netbook desktop and an SSD for what it's worth mine does Youtube just fine, since it's WebM, I don't go to CNN but it manages with other Flash based video that needs to die. The fact is as far as Windows is concerned I hit the power button when I bought it to make sure it could boot, upgraded the RAM, did it again, then I plowed it and put Linux on it so I've never really seen how well it works with Windows. The fact that Windows 7 Starter qualifies for t

      • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) * on Thursday July 23, 2015 @11:04AM (#50168529)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23, 2015 @08:12AM (#50167141)

    That's some boot time!

  • by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Thursday July 23, 2015 @08:33AM (#50167291) Homepage Journal

    "Windows 10 will launch in less than a week"

    If it won't launch in less than a day, I would say scrap the whole idea.
  • After all, according to the universal laws of Star Trek movies and Windows releases, this one is guaranteed to be good.
  • by genka ( 148122 ) on Thursday July 23, 2015 @08:41AM (#50167341) Homepage Journal
    My notebook has more CPU power and 2GB of RAM. Windows 10 Preview does about 5 minutes of hard drive thrashing after start up. After this the system works fairly well.
    • by gsslay ( 807818 )

      Pre-production versions of anything are notoriously clunky because they often still have test/debug code. You can't gauge their speed as an indication of anything.

  • I may follow the same path. I use my old netbook as an emergency backup laptop. Mostly to take notes. Since it has a real keyboard, even if small, it is handy to have around. Great to know it can run a modern OS.
  • by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Thursday July 23, 2015 @08:44AM (#50167367)
    As long as we are testing old hardware.
  • by operagost ( 62405 ) on Thursday July 23, 2015 @09:04AM (#50167543) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • by armanox ( 826486 )
      I tried a similar experiment on a Toshiba A105 (2GB RAM, 1.7 GHz Celeron M) and had similar results.
  • by cyberthanasis12 ( 926691 ) on Thursday July 23, 2015 @09:42AM (#50167869)
    The result is surprising to say the least, as installation not only went impressively fast but Windows 10 also works fast as long as you’re not launching a very demanding app such as Photoshop.
    My wife's very same netbook runs GIMP, LibreOffice, Firefox and video player concurrently and well under SuSE 13.1
    Oh, and under Win7 it takes ages to boot (you do have an antivirus, right?), so I will take the story with a grain of salt or two.
  • Granted, it is a little beefier specs-wise, but I have the Win 10 Pro 64-bit Preview installed on a Dell Inspiron 530 from mid-'07 and it is running great. It is a Core 2 Quad 6600 (2.4 GHz), has 6 GB DDR2 RAM, a 120 GB Crucial SSD (hacked BIOS re-enables AHCI that Dell removed), 1 TB WD Blue HDD and a 1 GB Radeon 6450.

    It works fine, plays 1080p video with no issues but is loud and puts out a lot of heat (105 watt processor). I am looking forward to replacing it with an Intel NUC later this year when the S

  • struggled to? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by robi5 ( 1261542 )

    Wouldn't it imply that it tried hard and (at least partially) failed?

    "Microsoft struggled to keep system requirements unchanged to make sure that everything runs smoothly"

    vs

    "Microsoft fought hard to keep system requirements unchanged to make sure that everything runs smoothly"

  • by ledow ( 319597 ) on Thursday July 23, 2015 @10:17AM (#50168161) Homepage

    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.

    • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Thursday July 23, 2015 @02:01PM (#50169883)

      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?

      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).

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