I recently updated my “old” windows notebook to Windows 7!! I was quite hesitant about the change as this “old” machine is an Intel Pentium R 2.33Ghz which I was not sure would play nice with Windows 7. There were posts on the web that did say that Windows 7 is definitely tolerant to older machines and does perform admirably well on them, so I decided to take the jump. The Windows 7 installation went like a breeze and within a few minutes my machine was ready to go. I noticed that all, if not most of my drivers were automatically installed and configured. The only part of my machine that did not play well with Windows 7 was my integrated graphics chipset the Intel 915 GML (which isn’t the best at everything but can be tweaked out to do some decent gaming!). The computer was pretty usable but the display driver that Windows 7 used surely slowed things down considerably
(for e.g.video stuttering! even on standard def.). A quick search on the Intel site revealed the Intel 915 & 910 chipsets were not supported on Windows 7 (nor will they ever be owing to their XPDM architecture), after tweaking things to the best possible performance I decided the old machine just didn’t have the stomach for Microsoft’s latest OS. If you are looking to run Windows 7 on older machines I suggest that you think twice, though there are blog posts saying that its a possibility it definitely doesn’t mean that you would end up with a reasonably usable computer.

On a sidenote, I really loved the Windows 7 experience, already missing it 😉