hmm 1ghz but do they even have a directx9 video card that is compatable with my pentium 3?

Yes

pretty much the vista requirements

You can buy a cheap Geforce 6200 128MB AGP to go with it. Or something like a 6600GT if you want a bit more firepower. The 6200 AGP will work. I have a PIII at 1Ghz, and it worlks fine.

Just be sure that your Pentium 3 can boot more than 512MB of RAM. Some boards of the time would not initialize more than 512MB. It probably had to do with the fact that Windows 98 didn't handle more than 512MB properly. And either way, it was a lot at the time.

i wonder if the my athlon x2 will work for XP mode?

You can still find plenty of new generation Radeon cards for AGP so it shouldn't really be a problem.
Anyway I don't really see anybody installing 7 on a 1 GHz CPU. Well except maybe for netbooks , those 1.6 GHz Atoms aren't really much more capable than a 1 GHz P 3. Not to mention the quality graphics found on those netbook IGPs , the 945 really is as crappy as you can get.
If you think about it though these requirements are way too high. Sure the new and even some older PCs don't have a problem with these specs but let's not forget what we're talking about here. 1 GB of RAM , that's like 1 GB = 1024 MB , a 1 GHz CPU , 16 GB of space on the hard drive , and that's just for the OS.
I remember having my first PC with 16 MB of RAM , a 133 MHz CPU and you know what , it managed to run Windows 95 just fine. I can accept times have changed , that Windows 7 is way more advanced , that it has Aero and so on ... But still , maybe 512 MB , a 500 MHz CPU and 8 GB of storage would have been enough. I do have a Linux PC that runs pretty well on that and it's using the latest KDE GUI , a new kernel , not something from 2000 like Windows XP.

These system requirements aren't high. If you don't have a system that meets the minimum requirements, don't bother trying to upgrade to the current OS.
It's like all the people that bought Dells with only 128MB of ram that complained that XP was slow. They should have known better.

It's more of xp emulation so it's more of a ram thing to make another desktop etc.

Well, actually the Atom does have some advantage. Unless you're talking about the P3 Tualatin, that has 512KB L2 Cache, which was rare on desktops, though you can find them in laptops, the all other P3's, including the normal Tualatins only had 256KB L2. And then you have to consider that the Atom has support for SSE2, and SSE3 which is a plus. And then there is the platform. The Atom has a 533 FSB compared to a 133 for the latest P3's. And P3's generally had PC133 RAM, compared to 533Mhz DDR2 or even 667Mhz for the netbook platform. So I'd say the Atoms are generally better suited.

I'd keep a P3 for a Windows XP or a Linux based Media Center. I have a P3 at 1Ghz with a 26W TDP, which is still pretty good by today's standards (those were efficient processors.. then came the P4... and fortunately then Intel went back to the gold old architecture )

Tualatin Celeron's had the 100mhz fsb and 256k cache, the later P3 Tualatins had the 512k and FSB133 etc and that good old low TDP the major benifit was the fact that that 815 series chipset was so efficent even Intel didnt bother putting on a heatsink on there motherboards

Down side those boards are showing there age and unreliability - working on several of mine that *were* working till i checked them today - looks like a rather large project to test all the crap i have and find some working parts (fingers crossed my ASUS TUSL2-C WORKS STILL, AND MY ABIT BH6).

My system that i will have at time of release of Win 7:

Phenom 2 955 at 4ghz
MSI 790FX Quad Crossfire Mb
8 Gb DDR3 1333 ram
ATI 1GB 4890/4870 in Crossfire
2 x 150GB Raptors in Raid 0
Windows Vista 64Bit SP1
Thermaltake Toughpower 750W PS
Gateway 1920 x 1200 panel DVI
3 20 xDVD RW burners/1 6 xBlu Ray reader

I should be good for a while even after 7 releases,lol

The PIIIs are still very usable. I recently pulled a Shuttle MV25N motherboard with a PIII Coppermine 1.0B (also the 26 W version) and 256 MB PC100 off a surplus pile, stuck a NIC, SATA card, and a few HDDs in it and turned it into a file/print server. There is more than enough CPU and RAM for the task as I'm running the latest version of Debian in text mode, which takes a whopping 38 MB (no typo) of RAM. Sure, the PCI bus is horribly bottlenecked when I hammer at the disks, but it does pretty well for a unit from 2001.

Atom rocks, my netbook can play Portal!

Haha seems everyone remembers good old P6 tech D

If you think about it, when it first appeared it was a ~30-40w Pentium Pro with a max of 200mhz - years later and alot of changes - ~12x the clock speed, ~12x the FSB, ~24x the cache, twice the cores (or more) and we still have the same thermal limits (mobile core 2 "T" series etc) - best architecture ever me thinks.

On the other hand in the K7 days i heard that some underclocked Athlon XP's were doing well in passively cooled file servers.

What happened to motherboard makers making a desktop motherboard for laptop chips - they were the true power savers.

Someone really needs to dig into the space issue. I've got a 4GB SSD in my netbook. Run's Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook edition. I can do EVERY SINGLE THING on it that I can do on my quadcore desktop except gaming. All photo/video/music storage on an SD card of course. Open Office, Kino, Gimp, everything! All this with just over 1/2GB to spare. Why the HELL does vista and 7 take over 10GB of HD space??????

i'm gomnmna update my ssytem for the 64 bit version of win 7

current specs :

amd athy 64 x2 5000+ black ed (oc'ed 3ghz)
3 gb ddr 2 pc 800
nvida gf 9600 gt
320 gb HD


when i get win 7 64 bit these will be my upgraded specs

amd phenom x3 8750 black edition (oc to 2.9-3.1 ghz ???)
6 gigs of ddr 2 pc 800 ram
ati 4000 (or 5000 series if it is out by then)
1tb HD + 320 hd i have now


sure my current system would mroe than ahndle 64 bit win 7 , but most these updates will shearly be fort eh sake of updating my PC after these updates i wont mess with this comp's config again and wills tart looking at building a new monster one to two years after these updates.

michaelahess
windows 7 comes with allot of stuff pre-built into it that Ubuntu doesnt, most of it you will never see or use but its still there.. hell the help file for windows 7 must be a few hundred MB with everything it covers.

there are programs out there that u can use to strip down the install size so have a look around

1GB of Windows Vista and Windows 7 is the Natural Language Search. By default it isn't even enabled

15GB or 20GB ... i know that 1TB HDD are cheap now and storage isn't supposed to be a problem, but as michaelahess said, on laptop, netbooks and even older desktops that might be a problem. I'm all for the "faster OS" label on win 7 but is that tone of software needed for the increase in system responsiveness?. Hope i can nLite it somehow and strip down all the unnecessary elements from it since it doesn't give me that options on installment.

Should we be thanking the otherwise useless netbook for lower system requirements?

Funny, my Beta doesn't even seem to take up 20GB, and its 64bit too.

I use my netbook at least 10 hours a week. Pretty good for something that's "useless". I'll stick with XP on it though - even if you can strip down the installation size of Win7, it will use much more than my nLited version of XP. Unless applications like Firefox, OpenOffice etc. suddenly start requiring Vista or Win7, XP does everything I need on it.

My Quad-core Phenom rig is Win7 ready - on the other hand Vista already works beautifully on it. Is the new taskbar really worth the cost of an upgrade?

Good deal, Microsoft needs a win here. As a US citizen I want MS to suceed, they are an American company I am proud of. No offense, not being egotistical. Windows 7 does look pretty nice though, I've been liking Vista Home Basic 64 though, seems pretty fast and stable on my Core i7. The Basic version has less bloat than the so-called "premium" versions, all those give you is crapware and slowness.

Ok. I have question. XP takes about 3GB on your disk and in the real word works best if you have at least 515MB with only lite apps installed. So it is ratio of 6 to 1.
Now Win7 is going to install on 10GB after some clean up and they say only 1GB RAM?! That is ratio of 10 to 1. Sorry but there is no way that Windows 7 is going to run well on 1GB machine. If you don't want your PC to crow with Win 7 go for 3GB RAM because you will need 2GB for the OS and 1GB for your other programs. Is MS going to learn the lessens from the past?! I can safely predict there will be some users that will get low grade PC and cry after that.

it's not only the taskbar, there are many major upgrade to vista's kernel for win7.
and yes, vista runs great on a good hardware! not and i7 or phenom II only, even core 2's! not only 4+GB ddr3 ram, even 2GB ddr2-800!
if someone has a PC with the P 3's specs, so, they are cheap or retard, they are cheap of not upgrading hardware, or retard that want to use 7 or vista on their old and tired hardware!

*Sigh*, why didn't they make it 64-bit only?

All Athlons X2 (families F and G, check with cpu-z) support hardware virtualization.

Also this little tool can instantly tell you if your CPU supports hardware virtualization:

http://www.grc.com/securable.htm

My Windows beta installed just fine on a 6GB disk!
Part of the whole is the pagefile (with 1-2GB of RAM, you can set it between 500 and 1024MB), and the Hybernation file.
The hybernation file takes up as much space as your ram (at least on XP), so I think it's a bit unfair to complain why 7 takes up 20GB with 12GB of RAM installed.
The sweetspot of a new installed Win 7 is 1GB of RAM (with 32-64MB shared video) ram. Disable hybernation and (which might not be available anymore on all Win 7 versions), and set swap to 512MB. Disable rollback service (windows recovery) and disable aero too.
Your system will fit on a 6Gb disk.
Install some office and other small applications and it all fits nice on a 12GB SSD; or cramped on a 8GB SSD.Perhaps we'll see flash memory going down in price soon, if win 7 equipped mininotebooks are being sold with 16GB SSD's; but that'll take MS to work on their defrag program quite a lot.
Also the Win7 starter edition will have a smaller footprint I hope.

*Glances at Via C3 in the corner*

Going back to the Pentium III situation, realistically speaking, anyone wishing to use it, will not be using PC133 SDRAM. You can with a Coppermine, but Coppermine's are pretty slow. Tualatins will require in most cases DDR 266 MHz memory, for the simple reason the i815 doesn't support more than 512 MB, and you'll need the Apollo Pro 266T for the chipset (unless you get one of the ServerWorks chipsets, which is a mistake for desktop). You can use SDRAM with some motherboards of the Apollo Pro 266T, but most support only DDR.

Most of the time, even to this day, I use Tualatin. It's a Celeron 1.4 GHz, and if I need to, I can overclock it easily to 1.6 GHz, which has the additional benefit of increasing the memory bus speed (which is a huge bottleneck on this processors).

The Pentium III-S is the 512K version, server version. It's much faster because of the bus speed, faster L2 cache, and larger cache memory. But, it's really not supposed to be used in a desktop motherboard, and will degrade because of the different load line characteristics.

The desktop Pentium III is a strange bird, having 256K cache, and the 1333 MHz bus, but only running at 1.2 GHz. Whether it's better than the Celeron is debatable, and it's harder to find for sure. At stock speeds it is, but the Celeron is really easy to overclock because only the processor is being overclocked, the memory is still under the 133 MHz value.

It's surely faster than the Atom, which is a very primitive processor. Memory performance is better, but everything else is much worse. The Pentium III is much more advanced.

By the way, the reason boards couldn't initialize more than 512MB was the 815 chipset. Intel deliberated weakened this chipset with mediocre performance and limited memory support so as not to compete too strongly with the RDRAM based i820, which sucked bad, or the higher end i840, which was actually quite excellent. In fact, the 440BX supported 2 GB, and performed better than the i815, but was not made for 133 MHz, and when overclocked to 133 MHz, would also overclock your AGP bus to 89 MHz.

The i840 was excellent, but expensive, and used VERY expensive RDRAM. The i820 sucked, and used VERY expensive RDRAM. i815 was mediocre, and didn't support much memory, and the 440BX had to run AGP overclocked if you wanted to run it 133 MHz. So, none were perfect solutions, which gave VIA an opening.

For the Tualatin, only the 815 came over, while VIA moved their 133T and Apollo Pro 266T to support it. The Apollo Pro was the clearly the best, having much better memory performance than the 133t (even when using SDRAM), and support dual processors and a lot of memory. There were some weird 815 boards with dual processors, but they were hard to find, and DDR showed greater advantages in dual processor roles (since the requesting processor didn't hog the memory bus for as long, since the burst completed faster with DDR).

But can it run Crysis?