News Developer Runs Windows 7 on a 5 MHz CPU with 128MB of RAM

[Admin]

One brave individual has managed to get the 2009-era OS to run on a Pentium-S CPU going at just 5 MHz.

Developer Runs Windows 7 on a 5 MHz CPU with 128MB of RAM : Read more

 

[KraakBal]

Can it run Crysis?

 

[Chung Leong]

Guy should find a copy of GeoWorks Ensemble see how that runs in comparison.

 

[Zizo007]

What about Lubuntu?

 

[coromonadalix]

Now it's the low end race loll the slowest you can be loll Well done

There was a cpu clock tool to lower the host cpu clock, i had an old game who would not start passed the 1.5 ghz barrier

 

[Exploding PSU]

Now it's the low end race loll the slowest you can be loll Well done

There was a cpu clock tool to lower the host cpu clock, i had an old game who would not start passed the 1.5 ghz barrier

This article and your comment inspired me to find a PC that could post the lowest benchmark scores. I'd have to dig out my single-core Atom netbook of yore, and see how low it can go.

 

[MisterZ]

Can it run Crysis?

No, Crysis runs it.

 

[jkflipflop98]

I would imagine someone has built a more powerful system out of redstone in Minecraft at this point.

 

[Vanderlindemedia]

So that CPU clock was emulated to tick at 5mhz ? Why not with "real" hardware ?

 

[Amdlova]

Last time I have used a old computer I have installed the league of legends on a durou cpu with 128mb of ram and a 3dfx voodoo 4 just to see how good its the feel when no one plays because your potato pc can't do de job. Slow slow painfully

 

[bit_user]

I had a Windows 10 corporate laptop with a Kaby Lake i5 that took about a half hour to reboot, log me in, and launch MS Teams. It turns out the problem was the A/C power cable was partially inserted into the back of the machine. For whatever reason, it decided to run slowly instead of just switching over to battery. Once I fully inserted the power cable, the laptop started running normally.

BTW, the machine was so badly configured (and had only a single stick of 8 GB memory) that this would normally take about 5 minutes. So, only a factor of 6 slowdown. The difference being that my employer had tons of stuff installed on it, whereas the guy in this article must've been using a bare bones install that would probably boot in seconds, on a PC like that Kaby Lake i5.

 

[bit_user]

So that CPU clock was emulated to tick at 5mhz ? Why not with "real" hardware ?

CPUs have a minimum clock speed they'll run at. You can't just clock them arbitrarily low.

Also, Windows 7 requires the CPU is probably at least a Pentium 4, if you run the 32-bit version. So, it's not like you can just use a CPU so old it actually could clock down to 5 MHz.

BTW, this reminds me of when I first saw Windows 95 running on my school's library computers. They were like 386SX-25 or whatever bare-minimum spec. I was honestly surprised to see they could even run it. I forget what they ran before, but I don't think it was even Windows. Anyway, it wasn't locked down at all, so I fired up a defrag and a bunch of other programs to see how badly I could bog it down. Didn't crash - that's all I can say for it.

 

[TerryLaze]

CPUs have a minimum clock speed they'll run at. You can't just clock them arbitrarily low.

Also, Windows 7 requires the CPU is probably at least a Pentium 4, if you run the 32-bit version. So, it's not like you can just use a CPU so old it actually could clock down to 5 MHz.

Also also a CPU running natively at 5Mhz would explode with 128Mb ram, most PCs back then didn't even have a full 1Mb.
Pentiums at 100+ Mhz would still come with 16Mb ram.

 

[bit_user]

Also also a CPU running natively at 5Mhz would explode with 128Mb ram, most PCs back then didn't even have a full 1Mb.

I have to nit-pick this, for the benefit of anyone who's curious...

The original 8086 used 20-bit addressing, which means memory was limited to 2^20 bytes = 1,048,576 bytes = 1 MiB. It had no support for "virtual memory", like we have today. So, software could only address 1 MB and the CPU package surely had only enough pins exposed to address that much.

I take it your point about it "exploding" was a reference to the fact that a PC case would overflow with all the DRAM chips it would've taken to reach 128 MB? Back then, RAM wasn't on DIMMs or SIMs, but instead you actually plugged the chips straight into the motherboard.

There's an interesting footnote, which is how 20-bit addressing was implemented in a 16-bit CPU. The way you'd compute an address is by adding a 16-bit "segment" register with an offset. This created an interesting technicality, because 2^16 * 16 + 2^16 = 1,114,112. So, when the 80286 came along and added a different addressing mode that meant it could address up to 16 MB, someone thought up a clever hack of using that top 64 kB from "real mode". This address range became refered to as "High Memory". If anyone remembers fiddling around with loading himem.sys, for certain DOS games, that's what it was - just a way of squeezing out a little more memory to be accessible from DOS mode, assuming your machine had > 1 MB of physical RAM.

 

[TerryLaze]

I take it your point about it "exploding" was a reference to the fact that a PC case would overflow with all the DRAM chips it would've taken to reach 128 MB? Back then, RAM wasn't on DIMMs or SIMs, but instead you actually plugged the chips straight into the motherboard.

It was just a dumb joke like, divide by zero = large hole.
I was just trying to say that an old system like that would have no way to use that much ram.

 

[ottonis]

I wonder how much a modern day Windows 10 install could be slimmed down to run only those processes that are necessary for a certain individual workflow.

For example: If I only use a machine for audio live performance and audio editing (incl. USB audio device, MIDI controller and tons of virtual instruments and plugins) and if I keep this machine completely offline and never connected to the internet and use no emails, no internet things, no office nada and play no games on it...

Is there a possibility to tailor a win10 (or win11) installation to have only those parts of the installation that are required to smoothly operate the designated tasks or will it always have to stay a full-blown installation running innumerous processes in the background that are entirely useless for the tasks at hand?

This question becomes relevant for people who have massive DAW setups, with hundreds of audio tracks, buses and innumerous audio plugins and virtual instruments and who really need to squeeze every bit of performance from their machine.

 

[USAFRet]

I wonder how much a modern day Windows 10 install could be slimmed down to run only those processes that are necessary for a certain individual workflow.

For example: If I only use a machine for audio live performance and audio editing (incl. USB audio device, MIDI controller and tons of virtual instruments and plugins) and if I keep this machine completely offline and never connected to the internet and use no emails, no internet things, no office nada and play no games on it...

Is there a possibility to tailor a win10 (or win11) installation to have only those parts of the installation that are required to smoothly operate the designated tasks or will it always have to stay a full-blown installation running innumerous processes in the background that are entirely useless for the tasks at hand?

This question becomes relevant for people who have massive DAW setups, with hundreds of audio tracks, buses and innumerous audio plugins and virtual instruments and who really need to squeeze every bit of performance from their machine.

The solution here would be twofold.

Simply turn off services and things that are not needed. Not modify the install.
Stuff that is not running consumes no resources other than drive space.

However, you need to be really really careful. It is very easy to get the system into a state where it no longer runs. We see that here all the time. People wanting to turn things off in the chase for 'privacy' or 'more FPS'. And then suddenly, the thing no longer works.
Only start down this road with a clone of a test install, that you can easily bring back to original condition.

The second solution would be to simply throw more hardware at it.

 

[ottonis]

The solution here would be twofold.

Simply turn off services and things that are not needed. Not modify the install.
Stuff that is not running consumes no resources other than drive space.

However, you need to be really really careful. It is very easy to get the system into a state where it no longer runs. We see that here all the time. People wanting to turn things off in the chase for 'privacy' or 'more FPS'. And then suddenly, the thing no longer works.
Only start down this road with a clone of a test install, that you can easily bring back to original condition.

The second solution would be to simply throw more hardware at it.

Thank you, this is definitely a good advice!
I guess that only Linux systems could be tailored from scratch but not a proprietary system like Win.

 

[Chung Leong]

I take it your point about it "exploding" was a reference to the fact that a PC case would overflow with all the DRAM chips it would've taken to reach 128 MB? Back then, RAM wasn't on DIMMs or SIMs, but instead you actually plugged the chips straight into the motherboard.

My PC/XT only had enough slots on the motherboard for 128K. The other 512K worth of memory chips were on a rather large ISA expansion card.

With a PC/AT I think you can in theory have 128MB if you have enough backplanes to plug all the expansion cards into.

 

[greenreaper]

I guess that only Linux systems could be tailored from scratch but not a proprietary system like Win.

By a user, essentially, yes. Microsoft has made a minimal bootable subset of Windows and over the years refined it to a very small number of components (previously it has dependencies everywhere). It can make targeted versions and has at least created targeted deployments (e.g. Server Core, Nano), although this normally constitutes what Linux users would consider server role package sets.

It is not clear to me whether the NT kernel itself is designed to be minified to cover certain features, although it'd be a natural extension of this "MinWin" philosophy - driver kernel modules can be limited by not including them, which gets a lot of the benefit.

 

[bit_user]

With a PC/AT I think you can in theory have 128MB if you have enough backplanes to plug all the expansion cards into.

The PC/AT was 286-specific, no? In that case, you're limited to 16 MB. The "protected mode" of the 286 was a forerunner to what came in the 386, but it was limited to just 24-bit addresses.