teaching an old pc new tricks

[radome]

I own an old Dell Inspiron that came with vista. it has 1 gb of ram and im not sure what the processor speed is. everything works great on the machine. would it be candidate for windows 7? Or should I buy a new laptop?

 

[Draygoes]

If win7 will install, but it sounds good to me.

 

[strollin]

Generally speaking, if a computer will run Vista, it will run Win 7 since 7 is less of a resource hog.

Does Dell have Win 7 drivers for that laptop on it's website? Shouldn't be a big deal if not since Vista & Win 7 drivers are often interchangeable.

 

[Celegorm]

1GB is the bare minimum for 7 so it could be a little choppy. without knowing the rest of your system specs I'd send you here:

Windows 7 system requirements - Windows Help

Also, you'd want to make sure your system has windows 7 drivers available for download from the manufacturer. While generally vista drivers have worked for windows 7 there is no guarantee of this.

 

[radome]

the computer is on my desk at work. tomorrow i will get the rest of the specs so you guys can give me better advice. the reason i hesitate to sell it or buy a new one is that it was a pretty high-end model when i bought it. i also know that programs and apps are getting bigger. as usual, you guys are awesome. i am hoping to get more opinions after i enter the total system specs.

thanks,

radome

 

[cb600fshornet]

1GB will probably run Windows 7, but for better performance you'd really want an extra 1GB of RAM in there to give you some headroom.

 

[BikerEcho]

Even though 1 gig RAM is not really enough for a good experience, it will still run windows 7 better than windows Vista.

 

[BK_123]

If you would like to know what the processor speed is download and run Speccy http://filehippo.com/download_speccy and that will tell you..

 

[Clarence]

My first laptop came with vista and i was able to upgrade to windows 7 successfully. Shouldn't be a problem

 

[strollin]

I ran Win 7 Pro on a netbook with 1.5GB of RAM for several years and it worked fairly well. It could multitask a few programs and did fine for typical computing tasks like web surfing, email, word processing, etc... Couldn't handle gaming and other cpu/gpu intensive tasks.