Why Does 7 "just work"?

[BigHog]

In the past twelve months or so, I have installed Windows 10 on at least three machines. One has worked very well. Another was so slow and buggy, I sold it off. And the third was also slow and buggy.

This last one, a "mature" PC with a Core 2 Duo, 4GB, GeForce 210, just wasn't happy. It had constant wireless disconnect issues, take-forever mouse response and other problems. On a hunch, I decided to do a clean install of Windows 7 on this machine. And it just works!

The wireless works perfectly and reliably. Mouse response and browser functions are much snappier.

Is there some simple reason for this? Have people noticed that older systems work better with 7, despite all the hype about Windows 10 having very low requirements? I find it fascinating.

 

[Colif]

Age of hardware is reason.

Core 2 Duo probably uses LGA 775 which is no longer supported by Intel or Microsoft. Its likely none of the hardware had drivers that work well with win 10 but are perfectly fine on Win 7 as it is based on Vista which was released at same time as the CPU

Hardware works fine but drivers are the problem. The people who made the hardware no longer support it.

My last PC was a Core 2 Duo, 4gb ram, GTX 260 (at one stage) - it sounds about same age as this PC. It had very few win 8 drivers as it is, so I didn't even contemplate putting win 10 on it. It is 9 years old, there comes a time new versions of windows don't help.

 

[delaro]

Microsoft offers Chipset manufacturers the needed tools to write the drivers, some companies like intel, Via and SiS have no interest in doing this past a certain length of time. You also have dozens of other smaller companies that have been bought out or gone bankrupt so active driver support is impossible. Windows 7 has a massive driver index that spans back to the XP days Windows 10 does not, it's index includes Win 8 but everything else is moved to a generic. The generic drivers normally work quite well but it's not a total guarantee since your looking at thousands of chipset PnP id codes.

 

[BigHog]

Thanks. This seems to make sense.
I'm glad I tried the Windows 7 route in this case. This used PC is now running perfectly now and can do just about everything I need it to do at this time.

 

[gamerk316]

In the past twelve months or so, I have installed Windows 10 on at least three machines. One has worked very well. Another was so slow and buggy, I sold it off. And the third was also slow and buggy.

This last one, a "mature" PC with a Core 2 Duo, 4GB, GeForce 210, just wasn't happy. It had constant wireless disconnect issues, take-forever mouse response and other problems. On a hunch, I decided to do a clean install of Windows 7 on this machine. And it just works!

The wireless works perfectly and reliably. Mouse response and browser functions are much snappier.

Is there some simple reason for this? Have people noticed that older systems work better with 7, despite all the hype about Windows 10 having very low requirements? I find it fascinating.

The third PC simply doesn't meet minimum requires for Windows 10. Can't say anything on the second (no specs given), but likely older hardware is the same reason.

 

[delaro]

In the past twelve months or so, I have installed Windows 10 on at least three machines. One has worked very well. Another was so slow and buggy, I sold it off. And the third was also slow and buggy.

This last one, a "mature" PC with a Core 2 Duo, 4GB, GeForce 210, just wasn't happy. It had constant wireless disconnect issues, take-forever mouse response and other problems. On a hunch, I decided to do a clean install of Windows 7 on this machine. And it just works!

The wireless works perfectly and reliably. Mouse response and browser functions are much snappier.

Is there some simple reason for this? Have people noticed that older systems work better with 7, despite all the hype about Windows 10 having very low requirements? I find it fascinating.

The third PC simply doesn't meet minimum requires for Windows 10. Can't say anything on the second (no specs given), but likely older hardware is the same reason.

Win 10 has some really low requirements. 1Ghz CPU, 1G of RAM and DX 9 GPU. To find a PC that is out of spec you have to go back to 2000 or below. Almost anything on LGA775 is going to meet spec with the exception of the GPU. DX 9 wasn't fully implemented until 2005 so it's possible to find early LGA775 low end systems 2006 with GPU's that don't support DX9.

With that being said early Core 2 Duo chips were less than 2ghz and would be pretty slow now mixed with low end GPU's and possibly even SATA revision 1.0 Hard drives things would be pretty pokey.

 

[BigHog]

Actually, all three systems DID MEET Windows 10 requirements. The one that I mentioned as being so bad I got rid of it, happened to be the newest of the three!


The one that seems to just love Windows 10 was a 2008 eMachine with an Athlon 64, on-board nVidia graphics and 2GB ram! I would have expected that one to struggle the most but it has no major issues.

The one I sold was a 2015 Dell laptop with a newer multi-core AMD chip (I forget the details), on-board Radeon graphics and 8 GB ram. Go figure.

(As for the Intel Core 2 Duo setup mentioned previously, it's an E7500 2.93 Mhz)

Thanks all.

 

[Colif]

a 2015 Dell machine is about as modern as the 2008 machine - they aren't known for using new parts and it would not surprise me at all to find they still use old things. with introduction of optane, laptop makers won't need to think about using ssd for a few more years, and I expect it will happen on oem desktops too.

AMD CPU didn't change a great deal in that time compared to Intel so its possible old drivers still work fine with it. They changed a lot this year but it was about time.

 

[BigHog]

Fascinating. This may explain a lot.


Minimum requirements aside....as we know a game running on minimum spec machines might be stuttering along at 5 fps- what specs would you look for in a sub-$400 PC, right now, if you wanted Windows 10 to run smoothly, with all the goodies turned on?

Thanks again.

 

[The Paladin]

I found dual core machines run nice under window 8.1, but laggy under windows 10 myself.