Windows 10 Preview running on 2 old laptops
Microsoft are about to release their latest Operating System. The upgrade to Windows 10 will be available to most users for free from July 29. In the meantime enthusiasts can try out a preview version, which I’ve had running on a little netbook for a while.
While Windows 10 runs on the netbook, it’s physically too small of a computer to be much more than a novelty. This weekend I dusted off a couple of old full size laptops to see if the new OS would run on some really old hardware. One of the laptops originally ran Windows XP and would be over 10 years old. The other was a Vista machine originally, but some years ago I’d installed Ubuntu because Vista was just too clunky. Surprisingly the old XP machine had 1GB of RAM, which would have been overkill in its day, but I wasn’t sure if that would be enough for the big old Dell laptop to run the modern software. The other Dell, has 2GB of RAM, so I gave that a better chance of working.
Once installed, I was really surprised that Windows 10 worked on both of these old machines. It didn’t “just” work, the new operating system ran well without any hiccups on both old laptops.
Microsoft have been working hard to make their latest operating system work across a wide range of hardware, and I think they’ve been successful if it can run on low spec hardware such as these old laptops.
What about Windows 10 as an operating system? I like it. A lot of people don’t like change or are too scared to learn something new, and will probably complain, but I found it intuitive and easy to work out. It’s a much better product than anything else we’ve seen from Microsoft.
Windows 10 is a free upgrade for existing Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users from July 29, and will be supported with any further upgrades for the life of the hardware.
More info here www.microsoft.com/en-au/windows/windows-10-faq