[AccessD] Windows 8 -> 10

Gustav Brock gustav at cactus.dk
Sun Sep 6 02:37:55 CDT 2015


Hi all

Having great success with Windows 10 on my other machines, I decided to go for the ultimate test ... to give this old Pavilion - now ten (10) years old - an update.

I did a clean install, and it ran fast without any trouble. It even found the old Bluetooth device, actually all devices except - as expected - the ATI Mobility Radeon X600 chip and a native media card. However, the old Vista drivers for these, which worked for Windows 7 and 8.1, still works. 

The only issue I encountered was the same as many others have reported, that on some older hardware the FastStart option doesn't work. It is turned on by default, but it somehow blocks before the login screen appears. But even with FastStart turned off, this old machine boots in 30 seconds.

Once again I have to say that Office 365 screams. With our MAPS subscription we have five(!) full Office 2013 (soon 2016) installs for each user (five users max.) and even on this old machine it downloads and installs in minutes. I don't know how MS does this, but it is way faster than dealing with DVDs or downloaded ISOs.

Also OneDrive is excellent. I just tell which Microsoft account to use and tells Windows to sync my settings, and in a few minutes I have the desktop background picture and many other settings than on my other machines. And, of course, a synced cloud drive that appears on the machine as any other drive. When I take a picture on my Lumia phone, within a minute or so, it is present in the picture folder on all my machines. 

Back to Windows 10: I also installed it on wife's home machine - an older i3 Fujitsu running Windows 7 running "slow" (= experienced) indeed for booting. Mounted it with an Intel SSD and Windows 10, and she hardly believed here eyes. It is now on in five seconds.

Conclusion: To bring new life to any machine, replace HDD with SDD and install Windows 10.

/gustav

________________________________________
Fra: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com <accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com> på vegne af Gustav Brock <gustav at cactus.dk>
Sendt: 13. september 2014 13:27
Til: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Emne: Re: [AccessD] Windows 8

Hi all

Well, this old zd8237 is now nearly 9 years old and still in good shape.

So I decided to beef it up with a 128 GB SSD drive and Windows 8.1 Update 2, of course as 32-bit.

It installed in half an hour. The trouble was - as expected - the old Radeon X600 chip for which the latest driver is for Vista.
I managed to fix this:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/94640ce9-9160-4166-8908-acffab5c71d5/ati-mobility-radeon-x600-driver-update-installs-but-screen-goes-black?forum=w7itprohardware&prof=required

The machine now boots in 25 seconds to the logon screen (domain logon) and 5 seconds more to the Desktop and runs as well as ever before.

So this must be the end to the myth that Windows 7/8 doesn't run on old hardware.

/gustav

________________________________________
Fra: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com <accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com> på vegne af Gustav Brock
Sendt: 2. december 2011 22:48
Til: accessd at databaseadvisors.com
Emne: Re: [AccessD] Windows 8

Hi Jim

Of course, most old hardware won't do.

But I just installed Windows 7 Pro on my 6 years old HP 17" Pavilion zd8000 (zd8237) laptop (P4, 3 GHz, 2 GB ram, 90 GB disk, ATI Radeon X600 with DirectX 9) and it runs of course not fast but smoothly.

It took a little to locate the legacy ATI video drivers for Vista, though.

/gustav


>>> jimdettman at verizon.net 01-12-2011 22:11 >>>

 Try running Win 7 on older hardware and you won't like it.

Jim.


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