[SOLVED] Can my pc run WIndows 10 64bit?

Feb 1, 2022
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I have an old PC and its specs are 4GB of DDR2 and an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU. Can it handle a 64bit version of Windows 10 without any problems?
 
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i had win 10 running on a q6600 system with no issues. you do need to look first and be sure you can find win 10 drivers for everything. that old of a system obviously has not had any new/updated drivers in a while.

you may lose some features when windows uses a generic basic driver for some of it, but otherwise it should work.

Math Geek

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i had win 10 running on a q6600 system with no issues. you do need to look first and be sure you can find win 10 drivers for everything. that old of a system obviously has not had any new/updated drivers in a while.

you may lose some features when windows uses a generic basic driver for some of it, but otherwise it should work.
 
Solution
4GB RAM is perfectly fine for Windows 10 64bit if you don't play resource-hungry games.

If you know how to remove the unnecessary apps and services from the installation, you should still have at least 60% of RAM available after Windows 10 started.

Note:

- Using SSD for the system disk is highly recommended.

- My system uses the built-in GPU and it still works great, but an external GPU is recommended if you want to play some moderate games.

- My typical usage: everything including Web development (Apache and MySQl server), Youtube, Office, Facebook...

- Things that eat the most of RAM are web browser tabs, if you don't open 100 of tabs at once you won't have problem. I have tested opening some 50 tabs and the system still usable thanks to the SSD.


Screenshot-2022-04-25-111943.jpg
 
That depends on the motherboard. For example 64-bit Windows 8.1 and 10 require the CMPXCHG16b instruction, and while all Core 2 Quads have it, all available BIOSes for the Intel DP35DP motherboard hide this from the system when queried.

Just try it, and if it doesn't work then 32-bit Windows 10 should work just as well on 4GB even though it can only access ~3.25GB of it. Either way Windows will work fine so long as you only do one thing at a time (you can even have many tabs in a browser so long as the browser is the only window open)
 
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joeldf

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i had win 10 running on a q6600 system with no issues. you do need to look first and be sure you can find win 10 drivers for everything. that old of a system obviously has not had any new/updated drivers in a while.

you may lose some features when windows uses a generic basic driver for some of it, but otherwise it should work.
I saw this and had to chime in. I too upgraded a PC wth that Q6600 cpu - an old Dell 530 Inspiron. It only had 2GB of ram and boy did it run slow. I eventually stuck another 4GB in it to bring it up to 6GB of ram. That actually helped a lot. It was for my youngest son to use. It had an old GeForce GT 630 in it (not original), and it actually ran Minecraft for him fairly well. That machine was from 2008 and actually came with Win XP on it. It was upgraded to Win 7 around 2011 before getting Win 10 around 2016. I finally retired it last Dec when we got my son a much newer Dell.
 

Math Geek

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I saw this and had to chime in. I too upgraded a PC wth that Q6600 cpu - an old Dell 530 Inspiron. It only had 2GB of ram and boy did it run slow. I eventually stuck another 4GB in it to bring it up to 6GB of ram. That actually helped a lot. It was for my youngest son to use. It had an old GeForce GT 630 in it (not original), and it actually ran Minecraft for him fairly well. That machine was from 2008 and actually came with Win XP on it. It was upgraded to Win 7 around 2011 before getting Win 10 around 2016. I finally retired it last Dec when we got my son a much newer Dell.

nice. my XPS 420 is actually still in use. it got passed down a number of times and now it is used by a neighbor who works from home. it has 8 gb ram and an r9-270 in it now. does the office work she needs it to do very well. i'm happy that 2008 system is still alive and kicking. it played older games rather well but of course anything real new brought the cpu/gpu combo to its knees.
 

USAFRet

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I saw this and had to chime in. I too upgraded a PC wth that Q6600 cpu - an old Dell 530 Inspiron. It only had 2GB of ram and boy did it run slow. I eventually stuck another 4GB in it to bring it up to 6GB of ram. That actually helped a lot. It was for my youngest son to use. It had an old GeForce GT 630 in it (not original), and it actually ran Minecraft for him fairly well. That machine was from 2008 and actually came with Win XP on it. It was upgraded to Win 7 around 2011 before getting Win 10 around 2016. I finally retired it last Dec when we got my son a much newer Dell.

The Q6600 is a nice CPU, people used to love it so much when it came out.

I still have a Q6600 mounted on a 775 motherboard that I run from time to time just for fun.
 
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Satan-IR

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I still have a Q6600 too on an Asus board with XP SP3. Haven't run it for a while, not sure if it would work now.

Yes it should 'work fine' to boot Windows and sit at desktop or run Office maybe.

Maybe if open and work on a single Word document at a time or surf the web with 1-2 tabs open in the browser would be ok. Also maybe disabling all the visuals of Windows menus and animations and such would help the performance and snappiness of the system a bit.

You open 6 tabs in a browser or 2-3 applications at same time and it would start struggling, thrashing at the Virtual Memory, the storage.