Installed Windows 7 Pro on an old Pentium M (1.6 GHz) laptop

[godwhomismike]

Yesterday morning, I was absolutely sick to death of the dreaded performance I was getting with Windows Vista Basic on an old Toshiba laptop, which has a 1.6 GHz Pentium M processor and 2GB of ram. So, I decided to install Windows 7 Professional on it, and WOW, just WOW.

The laptop is like an entirely new machine. Windows 7 Professional runs very smooth on it. During idle, it uses about 565 MB of ram. I have Office 2010 Technical Preview and Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0.5 installed on it. What a difference the OS makes. Vista Basic used to crawl on this laptop, but now, the performance is very snappy. I couldn't be more happy with it. And to think, I was considering tossing this laptop out. :lol:

Windows 7 Professional is significantly better than Vista on low end machines.

 

[blackwidow_rsa]

7 is a bit faster for me, although the boot time is longer.

 

[godwhomismike]

Maybe Toshiba borked the registry. The machine was painfully slow since day one.

 

[The_Prophecy]

Very possible. Especially with all the crapware the OEM's like to install on the computers they sell.

 

[mcnuggetofdeath]

Windows 7 scales very well. It booted up in 35 secs on an old 1.3GHz AMD Duron rig (Overclocked to 1.45GHz), 1Gb of PQI DDR 266, a 40Gb IDE HDD, and an ATI 9200 SE (No Vista drivers so no aero, games, etc). I think what you've stumbled upon is a combination of a solid OS and the lack of OEM crapware as mentioned above.

 

[tobensg]

I've been using Vista for a year now and think its great. Have also been using the RC1 of Win7 and that also runs quick. Win7 boots way quicker than Vista for me.

 

[ToreTrygg]

w7 IS better and faster. It is faster in booting, and in searching. I even don`t want to mention about process running speed.

 

[plast0000]

Yesterday morning, I was absolutely sick to death of the dreaded performance I was getting with Windows Vista Basic on an old Toshiba laptop, which has a 1.6 GHz Pentium M processor and 2GB of ram. So, I decided to install Windows 7 Professional on it, and WOW, just WOW.

The laptop is like an entirely new machine. Windows 7 Professional runs very smooth on it. During idle, it uses about 565 MB of ram. I have Office 2010 Technical Preview and Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0.5 installed on it. What a difference the OS makes. Vista Basic used to crawl on this laptop, but now, the performance is very snappy. I couldn't be more happy with it. And to think, I was considering tossing this laptop out. :lol:

Windows 7 Professional is significantly better than Vista on low end machines.

not all the time
I compared vista to 7 on a desktop pentium 4 and vista SP2 performed better