Running Windows 7 Beta on Really Old Hardware: Dream or Nightmare?

I downloaded a copy of the Windows 7 Beta directly from Microsoft to install on my spare laptop, an aged (roughly 4-1/2 years old) Panasonic Toughbook W2. This notebook is powered by a 1.1GHz Pentium M, has 512MB of RAM, just a 40GB hard drive, and integrated graphics driving an XGA display. And it runs absolutely great on Windows XP.

Now, it would be a disaster trying to get Vista to run on this machine; its RAM requirements alone would have made that pure folly. However, we keep hearing how Windows 7 is supposed to be a lot more streamlined and will be ideal for all these low-powered netbooks (sorry, Psion) that have been popping up like mushrooms after a long rain. So, will this old laptop run Windows 7 OK, or will it be an underpowered mess?

To find out, after burning the downloaded .ISO image to DVD-R, I instructed the Windows 7 Beta installer to put a brand-new W7 installation in the same partition as my current XP install. As this is a spare machine, there's nothing really there to lose, so I might as well give the OS as much resources as possible (in hindsight, I should have installed it into a separate partition and taken advantage of its dual-boot capabilities). The install took an impressively short 45 minutes, from start to end, even on this lowly piece of hardware.

Several components were non-functional after the installer finished up. These included wireless networking, the laptop's hotkeys (e.g., Ctrl-F2 to mute, Ctrl-F3 to dim the display, etc.), the integrated SD slot, audio, and my touchpad's scrolling controls. Checking the Device Manager, I also noticed that it was relying on a generic VGA adapter to run the display.

To attempt to rectify these things, I pulled out a flash drive containing the latest device drivers from Panasonic. Unfortunately, since the laptop was replace by the W4 in 2005, no Vista drivers were ever produced, so the ones I had were for XP. The short story is that most didn't work.

The only driver that worked fine was SigmaTel audio driver. The SD card slot was nonfunctional; even though the Ricoh bus driver was recognized, a second component was not. The special touchpad drivers were not compatible, so it was treated like a PS/2 mouse, which meant I lost some functionality.

In the case of the Hotkeys driver, Windows 7 informed me quite politely in a dialog window that this particular driver was not compatible with the OS due to some known problems. This was the only problem the system seemed to anticipate.

The major fail was with the display drivers. Windows 7's hardware manager recognized and installed the drivers for the fairly standard (IMO) Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME Extreme Graphics Controller, which seemed promising. However, upon restarting the system (required), the below dialog appeared after the system did some re-installing of drivers.

So, I found myself stuck in a continuous loop of restart-reinstall-restart-reinstall ad infinitum, which puts a bit of a damper on productivity. The only remedy was to uninstall the Intel drivers and let the system rely solely on the generic VGA adapter drivers. Unfortunately, that also meant that Hibernate and Standby, two power states I rely on heavily, were no longer available, either.

Performance-wise, the Windows 7 Beta runs noticeably slower on this machine than does Windows XP SP3. While it's not unusably lethargic, it does have its moments where its relying too heavily on disk caching to be very responsive. As you can see from the power meter gadget to the right, system RAM was consumed about 72% with no applications running. Needless to say, 512MB is clearly an inadequate amount of RAM.

So, while Windows 7 is getting a lot of good press for its parsimony, performance, and lower hardware requirements, it is still a more demanding OS than Windows XP is. And that's where I hope Microsoft is still striving to make some improvements. Netbooks, these low-power, ultraportable laptops that everyone is picking up for $400, are the new iPod. If Windows 7 can't do a great job, or at least as good a job as XP does on those, then it may very well get the same cool reception among consumers as Vista did. After all, XP is a terrific OS. GearBits runs on an XP box older than this Panasonic laptop and it regularly goes many months between reboots. So, while a new OS is vital to Microsoft's bottom line, I'm still unsure how either Vista or 7 are so much better in ways important to consumers that we should care. Microsoft bowed to demand to keep XP around far longer than it had planned; maybe the same will, or should, happen during the Windows 7 era.