Running Windows 8 Developer Preview on an Ancient Old Machine

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Since the entry point to run Windows 8 is super low, I decided to try it on one of retired HP boxes from the office and see how it flies or crawls.

Here is the system requirements for the Windows 8 Developer Preview:

System Requirements

Windows Developer Preview works great on the same hardware that powers Windows Vista and Windows 7:

  • 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
  • 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
  • 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
  • DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
  • Taking advantage of touch input requires a screen that supports multi-touch
  • To run Metro style Apps, you need a screen resolution of 1024 X 768 or greater

And here is one I just installed Windows 8 on it.

image thumb73 - Running Windows 8 Developer Preview on an Ancient Old Machine

It’s a HP DX2000MT machine that is 6 years old. It runs on Intel Pentium 4 CPU @2.8GHz. I did add a bit of RAM to beef it up to 2.5G but still left the IDE hard drive there hosting the OS. So the machine is ancient old but it still works in a reasonable performance. Only had I a touch screen hooked up I would stress it a lot more.

image thumb74 - Running Windows 8 Developer Preview on an Ancient Old Machine

The dinosaur is still breathing normally, only murmuring for a multi-touch screen.

15 COMMENTS

  1. Wonder how it would run on a 1GHz Pentium 3, don’t have 1 gig of ram yet. Will upgrade to 1 gig and report back. Interested to see if I can restore thus dinosaur without reverting to Linux distro.

  2. I have tried to install it on Toshiba Satelite p25-s507 which is 2.8 GHz Pentum 4 processor and with 2 GB RAM…. but I got a strange message that my processor is not supported 🙂

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