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I'm in the process of building a computer for my dad out of a bunch of old stuff I found. Had everything except the vid card, so I picked up an Nvidia 6600 for next to nothing on ebay. Now I'm trying to decide what OS to put on this monster.
So the full specs are,
Athlon XP 2700+, Asus A7V8X motherboard, 1.5GB PC3200/DDR400, Maxtor 160GB IDE drive, Samsung DVD-R, and of course the Nvidia 6600.I'd like to get it Windows 7, but I don't how it would run. Maybe Vista or XP?
Between vista and windows 7 go 4 win 7 because win 7 run smooth with 512mb.Or u can instal both win xp and win 7 in different partions.Go 4 win 7
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Yeah, definitely Win 7.
Windows XP isn't getting any newer, and despite 7 having higher hardware requirements than Vista, it runs amazingly well on older hardware (much faster than Vista).
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You can easily try Windows 7 but at some point you will have to pay for it. That also goes for XP unless you own it already.
XP will be faster in most cases.
Could run Linux,BSD or OpenSolaris (solaris).
Playing to the angels
Les Paul (1915-2009)
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How well does your Dad deal with change?
XP with SP3 updates is a mature operating system and is quite stable, it wouldn't require he need to learn much if any new stuff if he's already used XP, even if he hasn't used XP it's more similar to previous operating systems than it is to Vista and Windows 7, it's still going to be supported by Microsoft for quite a while, it will probably handle anything your Dad runs well with the 3gb you intend to use, and it may be noticably faster than Vista or Windows 7 with that amount of ram.
Vista and Windows 7 have a lot of things that are different. Of the two, Windows 7 is the better choice - it's primarily the same as Vista but it's more user friendly - the way Vista should have been in the first place.
If you dual or multiboot Vista or Windows 7 with XP or 2000, there are additional things you need to be made aware of.
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Thanks for the suggestions guys. So Windows 7 for a newer, better looking interface, XP for speed, and avoid Vista. Got it.
Tubesandwires, the system has 1.5GB of RAM, not 3GB. But anyway my dad is currently running XP Pro on a P3-850 with 768MB of RAM. Do you think the Athlon XP 2700 w/ 1.5GB will run Win 7 any faster than an old P3 runs XP? I really don't want his new computer to feel any slower than his old one.
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Windows 7 hasn't been officially released yet...you have another 3-4 weeks to go. The RC (release candidate) is still floating around the torrents, but even if you download & install it, it will have to be removed at some point & replaced with the RTM (release to marketing) version. Unless something has changed, the last I heard is the RC will not be upgradeable to the RTM.
I's not like you're building a "modern" system. The board, CPU & RAM are fairly old. I'd stick with XP.
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"..the system has 1.5GB of RAM, not 3GB..."
Oops. Even so, that may be more than adequate for your Dad's needs, unless he does use something that does benefit from more ram - e.g. if he likes to play recent or fairly recent games. Many people don't run anything that benefits from more than 512mb in XP; double that for Vista or Windows 7.
"Do you think the Athlon XP 2700 w/ 1.5GB will run Win 7 any faster than an old P3 runs XP?"
That's comparing apples to oranges, but I would think the XP 2700 system with Windows 7 would be faster. It would be noticably faster with XP however.
The Athlon XP cpus are two steps above P3s. When they came out with the XP cpus AMD felt it was no longer valid to merely compare the speed at which the cpu runs at, because the XP cpus were more efficient than the current P4s were at the time, so , e.g. 2700 is AMD's approximation of comparing it in overall peformance to the first generation of P4s running at 2.7ghz, despite the fact the speed the XP 2700 runs at is slower than that.
AMD is still doing that with their model names these days.
E.g. the 64 X2 6400+ runs at 3.2ghz
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Personally, I would stay with XP since that is what your Dad already knows. It will run faster than his current computer and it will be comfortable with no learning curve of a new OS.
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"it runs amazingly well on older hardware (much faster than Vista)."
"Many people don't run anything that benefits from more than 512mb in XP; double that for Vista or Windows 7."
"I would think the XP 2700 system with Windows 7 would be faster."
ok, that does it, I think I will put Windows 7 on it. Dad shouldn't have too much difficulty learning the new interface. He made the switch to Office 2007 not long ago, and complained about the Ribbon only a few times. :-))
Thank you, everyone, for all of your input!
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Have you used Vista or Windows 7 yourself ?
It doesn't sound like it.
I also said.....
"How well does your Dad deal with change? "
"Vista and Windows 7 have a lot of things that are different..."
How old is your Dad?
He's probably younger than mine, but I think my Dad would find Windows 7 requires a lot of learning.
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Well, I've never used Windows 7, but I've dabbled a bit in Vista on a friend's laptop. It seems to be a very quick-acting OS, but I guess that's to be expected from a laptop with a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo.
My dad learned Office 2007 himself, and I found that Ribbon interface much harder to master than Vista. As long as Windows 7 runs faster on this old-new Athlon 2700 than XP on the P3 we'll both be happy.
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