Compact Presario Quick Driver Question

[magruder13]

My Girlfriend has a Compact Presario that has 1gb of ram and vista.
1. I hate vista
2. It runs like crap with only 1gb of RAM

The drivers are made for Vista, will they work on win7? Plug and play should cover most of them I would assume.

I want to install win7 because ive read up that it works pretty good on only 1gb of RAM.

She uses it for facebook, pictures, and homework, nothing overly insane.



Also, can I install win7 on an external HDD as if it was an internal HDD then take it to her house and just throw it in her computer?

Thanks alot for the help.

 

[The_Prophecy]

1. Yes, most Vista drivers will work under Windows 7, as they are based on the same driver model.

2. 7 should run fine on 1GB of ram, but after you add in a firewall and antivirus client, you may notice the performance a little less than desirable, even with what you stated will be running on the machine. That being said, buying and installing a 1GB RAM stick is not an expensive endeavor.

3. Technically, you could install 7 to an external drive on your system and take the hard drive over to her place and hook it up to her computer, but there are 2 big reasons why this is not a smart way to go:

First, this can be difficult to accomplish depending on what hardware you have available to you, since it cannot be done if the hard drive is hooked up over USB. It must either be mounted internally, or hooked up over eSATA. If a USB attached drive is selected as the destination for the install, the Windows 7 installer will not let you proceed with setup.

Second, if your computers are different (specifically if the CPU's and/or chipsets are different), you may find that the hard drive that worked perfectly fine in your computer won't boot in your girlfriends computer no matter what you do.

 

[magruder13]

Best answer selected by magruder13.

 

[magruder13]

Okay, well I have a 3.5" internal HDD that I put into a external enclosure that hooks up via USB or eSata. I have many computers availible to me to install it. A core2 duo, turion x2, athalon x2, pentium 4, core i3, and pentium dual core. Since she is running a pentium dual core should it work out okay? I wont install any drivers until i get there, but ill have them downloaded. She lives about an hour away and I dont want to spend the whole weekend on the computer.

Thanks for the help!

 

[The_Prophecy]

Okay, well I have a 3.5" internal HDD that I put into a external enclosure that hooks up via USB or eSata. I have many computers availible to me to install it. A core2 duo, turion x2, athalon x2, pentium 4, core i3, and pentium dual core. Since she is running a pentium dual core should it work out okay? I wont install any drivers until i get there, but ill have them downloaded. She lives about an hour away and I dont want to spend the whole weekend on the computer.

Thanks for the help!

Drivers may not matter. If the HAL is configured for a specific machine's array of hardware, booting the hard drive on a different, incompatible machine will mean you won't be getting into Windows on the new computer to install drivers. You can take that chance if you want, but don't say you weren't warned it could happen.

Windows 7 is generally pretty flexible in this regard, as compared to Windows XP (Vista was pretty flexible too), but I still see this happen every now and then.

 

[magruder13]

Okay, ill take the chance, and if it doest happen then ill still have my disk on hand. You can close this thread, thanks alot for the support. =]

 

[The_Prophecy]

Glad I could help!