Search didn't turn up any general threads. Curious if there's any interest here on running Win10 on really really old hardware just for fun and of course report on actual usability.
Don't know how useful a separate thread may be apart from the Hardware and Installation blog now present but I am running Win10TP on a Dell Desktop that originally came with WinVista about 7 years ago and a Dell Notebook about 4.5 years old that came with Win7. Only drivers I needed were for my printers. Any computers older than what came with Vista need to assure the hardware meets the requirements, i.e. 1GHz CPU, 1GB RAM 32-bit or 2GB RAM 64-bit and sufficient drive space. I'd guess that drivers for old hardware will be problematic if not included in Win10.
Thanks.
I recall there was an effort during Win7 release when someone got it to boot to desktop on a PentiumII just to see if it could be done. This isn't totally about old hardware that would work out of the box although that would be good to know. I think if your hardware came with Win7 then it's not really applicable to the challenge.
I just got 10074 running on a Dell XPS m170 which came with XP. I've got all devices working and it's kinda usable. Nothing broken at least.
I've recently got it going on my old laptop which is late XP/early Vista era. Took me ages to figure out that the problems I was having were due to faulty RAM (ironically an upgrade and the newest component on the machine) rather than Win 10 itself. I've not used it much in that setup yet though.
I've tried an old Vista Dell and it worked fine. Also had it on an old laptop. It also worked but it was a bit slow.
The requirement for DEP will stop us going too far back in time. Mind you, I got one old one to install via the 'backdoor' by running the setup.exe from the boot disk sources folder.
According to this page:
Data Execution Prevention: frequently asked questions
Win10 will fallback to software DEP if the CPU does not support it.
I haven't found any clear answer to the question:
Will Windows-10 install and run on an older laptop whose BIOS "knows nothing about UEFI?"
In my case it is an 8-year old DELL Vostro 1500 that runs Windows-7 just fine. When I ran MS's Upgrade Assistant, its report stated "Secure Boot isn't compatible with your PC" Then continues with "...so you won't be able to use it in Windows 8.1"
The clear answer is Yes. Windows 10 runs fine on BIOS as well as UEFI. The major factor of whether Windows 10 will run on your older hardware is if your CPU is supported (assuming all other prerequisites are passed, memory, disk space, etc..).
Minor factors include (older bios's may not be compatible with Windows 10 and might need an upgrade, if available, you may have hardware or drivers, or even 3rd party software that is incompatible, or there may not be drivers available for some of your hardware.
I think what it means by "you won't be able to use it" is that you won't be able to use Secure Boot.
What Mystere said. I believe some DELLs needed a BIOS update to run Windows 8, which will presumably apply for Windows 10 as well, so it's worth checking you have the latest BIOS for it if you haven't already.
For my old XP era laptop, I found one useful tip is to expand out everything in Device Manager and screenshot it while still in the older, working configuration. Then when some obscure driver fails to install automatically in Windows 10, and (in my case) just says 'Mass Storage' or something vague like that, the screenshot from the old one will give you a clue what's missing. There's probably a more high-tech way to do this though...
Thank you for the clear and insightful reply. Pity, this information is not being made more readily available.
